The Old Drift

A Novel

By: Namwali Serpell

Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh, Richard E. Grant, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith

“A dazzling debut, establishing Namwali Serpell as a writer on the world stage.”—Salman Rushdie, The New York Times Book Review

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Dwight Garner, The New York Times • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Atlantic • BuzzFeed • Tordotcom • Kirkus Reviews • BookPage

WINNER: The Arthur C. Clarke Award • The Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award • The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction • The Windham-Campbell Prizes for Fiction

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

1904. On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there is a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. 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 the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. This sets off a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families (black, white, brown) as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond. As the generations pass, their lives—their triumphs, errors, losses and hopes—emerge through a panorama of history, fairytale, romance and science fiction.

From a woman covered with hair and another plagued with endless tears, to forbidden love affairs and fiery political ones, to homegrown technological marvels like Afronauts, microdrones and viral vaccines, this gripping, unforgettable novel is a testament to our yearning to create and cross borders, and a meditation on the slow, grand passage of time.

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize • Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

“An intimate, brainy, gleaming epic . . . This is a dazzling book, as ambitious as any first novel published this decade.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“A founding epic in the vein of Virgil’s Aeneid . . . though in its sprawling size, its flavor of picaresque comedy and its fusion of family lore with national politics it more resembles Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.”—The Wall Street Journal

“A story that intertwines strangers into families, which we'll follow for a century, magic into everyday moments, and the story of a nation, Zambia.”—NPR

Brilliant

Brilliantly interwoven storytelling , cast of characters, Beautiful language, Challenging ideas, revolutionary politics, and great readers.

Supreme narration of an epic African saga.

Amazing. A narrative triumph! A book to listen to more than once both for the story and the voices.

Fantastic read!

everyone in the book has such an interesting life experience, and the glimpses into these joyful, tragic lives are given in such a way that one can feel the universal experience of humanity. This together with the uniqueness of the individual and those elements that make us ourselves. gripping!

Beautiful characters over time

I'm honestly not too sure what this book was about persay, but I really liked it. It tells the tales of 9 people, who all end up related and connected. It also tells the tale of a dam, and the birth of a nation, and a revolution. It has so much, and is so human, and as with the people, it's not just one thing.

Maybe the author was overly ambitious?

The Old Drift is a multi-part saga. The story and writing hang together well in the first two parts, but then things get very messy in the third part. Too bad as the character development and plots and sub-plots are engrossing . Part 3 reads more like vignettes than the type of tight and effective story-telling in the first two parts.