Atmospheric, heart-rending and multi-layered

Romantic, revealing and rich in heart-rending emotion and atmospheric detail . . . could well be the pick of Richard and Judy's spring bunch

This romance novel conjures up the past in an imaginative way

A great story, full of atmosphere

Praise for Lucinda Riley

Thoroughly addictive storytelling with a moving, emotional heart

Delicious reading

Absolutely impossible to put down

A brilliant page-turner just soaked in glamour and romance

An absolutely fantastic storyteller

Brilliant escapism

One of the strongest authors in this genre . . . excellent historical detail, heart-wrenching romance, and an engaging mystery

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!

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 García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

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 García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

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

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

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

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

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

A rambunctious epic… Serpell is an ambitious and talented writer, with the chutzpah to work on a huge canvas…a writer to watch

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