Extraordinary, ambitious, evocative... The Old Drift is an impressive book, ranging skillfully between historical and science fiction, shifting gears between political argument, psychological realism and rich fabulism...a dazzling debut, establishing Namwali Serpell as a writer on the world stage -- Salman Rushdie * New York Times Book Review *
Brilliant...there are moments of such heart-wrenching poignancy that I had to put the book down several times and recompose myself. Serpell writes with the emotional maturity and sardonic smile of one who has lived several times already -- Leaf Arbuthnot * Sunday Times *
An intimate, brainy, gleaming epic... The reader who picks up The Old Drift is likely to be more than simply impressed. This is a dazzling book, as ambitious as any first novel published this decade. It made the skin on the back of my neck prickle...she's such a generous writer. The people and the ideas in The Old Drift, like dervishes, are set whirling -- Dwight Garner * New York Times *
From the poetry and subtle humor constantly alive in its language, to the cast of fulsome characters that defy simple categorization, The Old Drift is a novel that satisfies on all levels. Namwali Serpell excels in creating portraits of resilience-each unique and often heartbreaking. In The Old Drift the individual struggle is cast against a world of shifting principles and politics, and Serpell captures the quicksand nature of a nation's roiling change with exacting precision. My only regret is that once begun, I reached the end all too soon -- Alice Sebold
An impressive first novel... The Old Drift is electric with the sense that Serpell is laying down pieces in a puzzle kept teasingly out of sight... A growing sense that The Old Drift could go on for ever is tribute to its inventiveness -- Anthony Cummins * Observer *
Brilliantly inventive -- Joyce Carol Oates * Times Literary Supplement *
It's difficult to think of another novel that is at once so sweepingly ambitious and so intricately patterned, delivering the pleasures of saga and poetry in equal measure. The Old Drift is an endlessly innovative, voraciously brilliant book, and Namwali Serpell is among the most distinctive and exciting writers to emerge in years -- Garth Greenwell
A vast, ambitious and polyphonous debut novel by a writer whose criticism and short stories I've admired for years -- Robert Macfarlane * Big Issue, *Books of the Year* *
The Old Drift is, to me, the great African novel of the twenty-first century. The scale, the characters, the polish and lyricism of the passages all conspire to tell an unforgettable tale. At last, a book that acknowledges that the African lives with the fantastic and mundane. At last, an African book of unarguable universality. Namwali Serpell has created something specifically Zambian and generally African at the same time. The Old Drift is everything fiction should be, and everything those of us who write should aspire to -- Tade Thompson, chair of judges of the Arthur C. Clark Award 2020
This mesmerizing debut novel tells the history of Zambia through three families whose lives-and blood-commingle across more than a century. The narrative is long and dense, but it rarely drags, thanks to Serpell's eclectic blending of literary traditions, from the Victorian novel to magical realism and Afrofuturism. The revolving cast is full of striking characters... Serpell's master storytelling may provide a remedy to a problem remarked on by one character: that "most Westerners don't even know whereabouts in Africa we are." * New Yorker *
an intimate, brainy, gleaming epic * New York Times *
Namwali Serpell's vibrant, intellectually rich debut novel, The Old Drift, is in keeping in that tradition, and like any good nation-hoovering novel, it too refuses to conform to expectations... This oddball cast of characters simply represents the joys of the picaresque novel, in which the author's set design is intentionally surreal and ironic... Serpell is a natural social novelist, capable of conjuring a Dickensian range of characters with a painterly eye for detail * Washington Post *
An astonishing novel, a riot for the senses, filled with the music and scents and sensations of Zambia. Namwali Serpell writes about people, land and longing with such compassionate humour and precision, there's an old wisdom in these pages. In short, make room on your shelf next to a few of your other favourites: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Tsisi Dangarembga and Edwidge Danticat jump to mind. It's brilliant. This woman was born to write! -- Alexandra Fuller
In turn charming, heartbreaking, and breathtaking, The Old Drift is a staggeringly ambitious, genre-busting multigenerational saga with moxie for days... I wanted it to go on forever. A worthy heir to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Carmen Maria Machado
Stunning...grappling with grandiose, complex notions, funneled through a kind of worldly knowledge and historical curiosity - all of which is ultimately grounded in an attention to the interiors of individual lives... Serpell's vision has made The Old Drift among the most buzzed-about books of the year. It is perhaps not enough to say that the novel is audacious for being a debut in the form of a near 600-page multigenerational epic...the work is already being compared to both canonical and modern classics - Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Zadie Smith's White Teeth * San Francisco Chronicle *
This is a founding epic in the vein of Virgil's Aeneid, which provides the book's epigraph, 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 * Wall Street Journal *
The Old Drift is a stunning achievement: a novel of epic scope and powerful vision that also manages to be intimate, tender, and very funny. A truly important debut from a brilliant new voice -- Fiona McFarlane
The Old Drift is an extraordinary meditation on identity, the history of a nation, love, politics, family, friendship and life. Serpell's prose is dazzling. Darting back and forth through the decades and mixing different genres, Namwali has delivered an original, remarkable, magical work that both delights and challenges -- Chika Unigwe
The Old Drift is a dazzling genre-bender of a novel, an astonishing historical and futuristic feat, a page-turner with a plot that consistently and cleverly upends itself. Playfully poetic and outright serious at once, it is one of the most intelligent debuts I've read this year. No matter your reading preference, there's something in it for you -- Chinelo Okparanta
If, as she writes, "history is the annals of the bully on the playground" then in The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell wreaks havoc on the Zambian annals by rewriting the past, creating a new present, and conjuring an alternative future. In refusing to be bound by genre, Serpell is audacious and shrewd. This is a Zambian history of pain and exploitation, trial and error, and hope and triumph -- Jennifer Makumbi
A rambunctious epic... Serpell is an ambitious and talented writer, with the chutzpah to work on a huge canvas...a writer to watch -- Nadifa Mohamed * Guardian *
