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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
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| English | |
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THE OLD DRIFT
This is the first novel ever to tell the story of Zambia from its very beginnings to the present day and beyond. Crossing centuries, borders, and genres, this electrifying debut tells a sweeping tale of a small African country, its origins and the trials and tribulations of its people.
It starts at the majestic Victoria Falls, where there was once a colonial settlement called the Old Drift. In 1904, in the smoky dining room of the Victoria Falls Hotel, a fever-addled British settler makes a mistake that entangles his family's fate with those of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. As this error ripples over the centuries, the lives of these families keep converging. We meet characters like a girl covered from head to toe in hair, a blind tennis player with eye-riddled skin, a woman whose tears seem endless, and a group of Afronauts who try to join the Space Race. The novel crescendos with a love story and a political protest in a brilliantly imagined Africa of the near future, filled with homegrown technological marvels from microdrones to viral vaccines.
With playful language, Serpell masterfully blends historical fiction, fairy-tale fables, romance, and science fiction. On each page, she turns stereotypes and tropes on their heads, unsettling the stories we think we know about Africa, from colonialism to migration, gender to race, poverty to politics, and nationhood to technology. Through THE OLD DRIFT's cast of vivid characters - including Zambia, which proves to be a character itself - Serpell shows that, if to err is human, then even the slightest error can still be a powerful force for transformation. Incisive, expansive, and subversive, THE OLD DRIFT announces Namwali Serpell as a major new literary talent.
NAMWALI SERPELL is a Zambian writer who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story "The Sack." She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for women writers in 2011 and was selected for the Africa39, a 2014 Hay Festival project to identify the best African writers under forty. Her first published story, "Muzungu," was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2009 and shortlisted for the 2010 Caine Prize. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney's, The Believer, Tin House, Triple Canopy, Callaloo, n+1, Cabinet, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, and the New York Review of Books.
With playful language, Serpell masterfully blends historical fiction, fairy-tale fables, romance, and science fiction. On each page, she turns stereotypes and tropes on their heads, unsettling the stories we think we know about Africa, from colonialism to migration, gender to race, poverty to politics, and nationhood to technology. Through THE OLD DRIFT's cast of vivid characters - including Zambia, which proves to be a character itself - Serpell shows that, if to err is human, then even the slightest error can still be a powerful force for transformation. Incisive, expansive, and subversive, THE OLD DRIFT announces Namwali Serpell as a major new literary talent.
NAMWALI SERPELL is a Zambian writer who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story "The Sack." She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for women writers in 2011 and was selected for the Africa39, a 2014 Hay Festival project to identify the best African writers under forty. Her first published story, "Muzungu," was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2009 and shortlisted for the 2010 Caine Prize. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney's, The Believer, Tin House, Triple Canopy, Callaloo, n+1, Cabinet, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, and the New York Review of Books.
| Available products |
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Book
Published 2019-03-21 by Hogarth/Crown |
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Book
Published 2019-03-21 by Hogarth/Crown |