The Old Drift

Product Description

From the winner of the Caine Prize comes the Great Zambian novel you didn?t know you were waiting forNamwali Serpell?s ground-shaking debut novel is an epic story of three generations of three Zambian families - one black, one brown and one white. Unfolding over 200 years, but set mainly in the twentieth century, one family begins in Italy, another in England and the third in Zambia.The three families? lives become entwined as each is plagued by a curse passed on down the generations. Hugely ambitious, each of the three 'books? that make up the novel - The Grandmothers, The Mothers, The Children - engages with a different genre of writing, satirizing the kind of language historically used to describe Africa, whilst celebrating the diversity and hybridity of African culture.Playful, full of humour and utterly captivating in its storytelling - this is a colossal novel that you can live in. Sprawling out across time and space, it recalls One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, animating a culture that cannot escape its colonial past, but which yearns for greatness.From the winner of the Caine Prize comes the Great Zambian novel you didn?t know you were waiting forNamwali Serpell?s ground-shaking debut novel is an epic story of three generations of three Zambian families - one black, one brown and one white. Unfolding over 200 years, but set mainly in the twentieth century, one family begins in Italy, another in England and the third in Zambia.The three families? lives become entwined as each is plagued by a curse passed on down the generations. Hugely ambitious, each of the three 'books? that make up the novel - The Grandmothers, The Mothers, The Children - engages with a different genre of writing, satirizing the kind of language historically used to describe Africa, whilst celebrating the diversity and hybridity of African culture.Playful, full of humour and utterly captivating in its storytelling - this is a colossal novel that you can live in. Sprawling out across time and space, it recalls One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, animating a culture that cannot escape its colonial past, but which yearns for greatness.
NAMWALI SERPELL is a Zambian writer who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers? Award for women writers in 2011 and was selected for the Africa 39, a 2014 Hay Festival project to identify the best African writers under 40. Her first published story, 'Muzungu', was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2009 and shortlisted for the 2010 Caine Prize for African writing. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for her story 'The Sack'. The Old Drift is her first novel.