Product Description
The Old Drift
Author: Namwali Serpell
Format: Paperback
HWA Crowns 2019
Arthur C. Clarke 2020
**Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2020**
'The great African novel of the twenty-first century' — Tade Thompson, author of Rosewater
On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there was once a colonial settlement called The Old Drift.
In 1904, in a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles his fate with those of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy.
So begins a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond.
'Extraordinary, ambitious, evocative, dazzling' — Salman Rushdie
'Brilliant . . . heartbreaking' — Sunday Times
'Charming, heartbreaking and breathtaking' — Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
About the Author
Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her second novel, The Furrows, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and selected as one of The New York Times’s Ten Best Books of the Year. Her book of criticism, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a professor of English at Harvard University.
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