Warm-hearted fiction … Debbie Macomber knows how to write an absorbing novel.

[Scibona is] a born novelist: He conveys a world in a detail. Scibona can take us into the broken heart of a child lost in a foreign airport, the shattering chaos of a night assault during the Vietnam War and the quiet intensity of a working-class New York neighborhood... Work like The Volunteer can never be one thing only, upbeat or down. It’s teeming, brilliantly.

Salvatore Scibona’s exhilarating new novel [is]… a searing record of war and the lies people live by… Despite all the destruction and despair, in this novel hope emerges as the wildest high.

What perfect pitch, what perfect rhythm. These are sentences that are in love with the world and that make us love the world, too.

Scibona is a remarkable writer and The Volunteer is a remarkable book... It is a war story unlike any other war story, a story of fathers and sons, of family (both biological and manufactured) and of generations of betrayal and abandonment... All of it — all of it — is just so ridiculously beautiful.

Salvatore Scibona is gravely, terminally, a born writer – a high artist and exquisite craftsman. Yes his sentences are perfect but not merely; a surplus of dark and tender wisdom, who knows its source, makes his language – and the world – glow with meaning.

The Volunteer is a wonder right from page one, lovely in its language and aching in its insights.

This magnificent and deeply moving novel by Salvatore Scibona, one of our most masterful writers, has at its heart the simple and compelling tale of a small boy abandoned in a foreign airport and a mysterious ‘volunteer’ who all his life, without knowing it, is trying to find him. In stunningly inventive prose, Scibona models the world through which these two beautifully drawn lost souls stumble—an infinitely-interconnected and repeating fractal of airplane routes and inscrutable tongues, of arbitrary hubs and meaningless destinations, of escapes and hideouts, of swarming megalopoli improbably wired to pitiful ghost towns such as only America can hide in its empty middle. All this under the crosshatched shadow of the military, for Scibona’s portrait of the way we live now is also, necessarily, a novel about war. The Volunteer is so brave, tough and admirable you are on his side before you recognize what you are looking at. He is the good soldier, the man who fights America’s wars.

Salvatore Scibona is a virtuoso and The Volunteer is a majestic, magnificent, frankly epic work of art. Characters with the most modest, vulnerable lives transform from 'nobodies' into full, precious human souls, steeped in pathos, tragedy, and a seemingly unstoppable heritage of particularly American violence. What tenderness and love they manage to wrest from their lives becomes nothing less than heroic and starkly, luminously beautiful.

Scibona’s lyrical yet muscular prose anchors this majestic work as he probes deep philosophical questions about family, identity, belonging, and sacrifice... Scibona’s greatest strength is his ability to inhabit each character with profound psychological depth to explore their guilt, doubt, and humanity. This novel rewards close reading and deserves wide readership.

Like the late Robert Stone, Scibona exhibits a command of language and demonstrates a knack for dramatizing the tidal pull of history on individual destiny. The novel accrues real power as its vividly imagined characters try to make sense of an often senseless world. This is a bold, rewarding novel.

The Volunteer possesses an intensity of purpose and takes in a broad sweep of time... Through Scibona’s masterful storytelling, modest, vulnerable characters—vividly imagined—are transformed into cherished and tragic souls able to seize benevolence and love as they try to make sense of an often senseless world. Scibona’s immersive, intense, and somber novel, its language eloquent and moving, deserves and requires a close reading... The Volunteer is a stirring examination into the meaning of family, identity, belonging, and sacrifice, and the effects of institutional power at its most horrifying.

Scibona delivers an enigmatic story that hinges on secrecy and uncertainty... As with his first novel, with which it has thematic similarities, Scibona's story takes in a broad sweep of time, looking into the future to foresee an end that may not be so terrible but that is just as certain... the narrative is marked by distinctive lyricism and striking images... original and memorable.

Scibona’s second novel sings with this type of mutable, potentially explosive detail, with events powered by tiny moments sprinkled across vast landscapes... It is not just the ebb and flow of family dynamics that make their mark on four generations in The Volunteer — both the weight of history and the influence of institutional power are also felt in the family’s losses.

Masterful.

[A] brilliant second novel… nothing is lost on Scibona, who builds his narrative masterfully over four hundred pages…[with] always-thrilling prose.

Ten years after his debut with The End, Scibona has produced another exceptional, challenging work… the prose is often stunning.

A muscular account of human frailty and a pitiless critique of western masculinity… The Volunteer drifts and broods… its cumulative power is like sustained rolling thunder.

A bravura piece of writing that reels you in before Scibona starts to make us sweat over his purpose… This is heart-rendering stuff, superbly done… Scibona lavishes attention on practically everyone his sprawling narrative reveals.

Scibona is an observant, lyrical writer, and the strength of his images and musicality of his sentences are almost enough to carry the novel on their own.

A searing yet poetic record of war and the lies people live by.

Monumental and powerful... The Old Drift is a novel that will leave you reeling and picking apart its many ideas, leaving almost no concept unexplored – whether that’s colonialism, capitalism, racial identity, political identity, climate change or government surveillance... Its ultimate hook though is Serpell’s awe-inspiring deftness at jumping from one location, time and character to the next, and fixing you firmly in each and every one. It’s a decidedly impressive debut

Funny, inventive and propulsive

Namwali Serpell’s electric debut novel The Old Drift is richly satisfying in its storytelling and ambition… Sweeping but also playful, Serpell as a major talent

One of my favourite books for many, many years, it's complex and beautiful

Full of magic, history, and humor, The Old Drift will be unlike anything you’ve ever read

Serpell expertly weaves in a preponderance of themes, issues, and history, including Zambia’s independence, the AIDS epidemic, white supremacy, patriarchy, familial legacy, and the infinite variations of lust and love. Recalling the work of Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez as a sometimes magical, sometimes horrifically real portrait of a place, Serpell’s novel goes into the future of the 2020s, when the various plot threads come together in a startling conclusion. Intricately imagined, brilliantly constructed, and staggering in its scope, this is an astonishing novel

Namwali Serpell’s spellbinding debut is worth the investment

The Old Drift is an astounding novel… inventive and powerful–it is also surprisingly funny and plays brilliantly with language… beautiful, rewarding and thought-provoking

An original, poetic novel from an already award-winning writer is one of the year’s most anticipated debuts

An impressive book that demands your attention, and rewards your commitment with a beautifully told, richly evocative tale

Comparisons with Gabriel García Márquez are inevitable and likely warranted. But this novel's generous spirit, sensory richness, and visionary heft make it almost unique among magical realist epics

A mastery of language, a deftness in description, and a dip into surrealist and speculative elements makes The Old Drift a worthwhile study in holding together several storylines through the characterization of those searching for their calling, and the cost of those pursuits

This inventive first novel by Serpell, a Caine Prize winner, spans two centuries in Zambian history, mixing styles from Gothic to Afrofuturist

I recommend Namwali Serpell's 2019 Zambian tour de force The Old Drift. This is a long book – all 563 pages of it – by a writer whose prose and outsize imagination will hold you spellbound throughout

A tremendous novel, completely hypnotising

I loved Namwali Serpell's novel The Old Drift, a shimmering, shape-shifting epic of Zambia written over twenty years