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The Old Drift Namwali Serpell
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The novelist, literary critic and short story writer Namwali Serpell was born in Zambia 16 years after her country threw off colonial rule. She began writing The Old Drift as a senior at Yale University and worked on it episodically for the next 18 years. From the beginning, she and her friends would joke, “It’s the great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for.” The novel spools out from a fateful 1904 incident set in a hotel bar near the Old Drift, a colonial settlement on the Zambezi River where the waters are quiet enough to drift across in a boat. This accident involving a local busboy, an Italian hotelier and a British photographer reverberates across three generations and 566 pages.
