In fact, throughout the book, while the Zambezi surges and floods and glides, the humans drift, both narratively and in terms of their characterisation. The hardscrabble, alcohol-soaked world he inhabits is well drawn and realistically evoked, but as a character he seems oddly flat, a pastiche of a pith-helmeted colonial brute. Percy is the type of man who refers to “Merrie Old England” and gives “natives” a wallop when necessary. The novel is divided into parts that follow matrilineal inheritances – grandmothers, daughters, granddaughters – but we begin with a grandfather, Percy Clark, an itinerant British photographer ekeing out a living near Victoria Falls at the turn of the 20th century. That work is a subtle and economical piece of writing which does not prepare one for the expansive and genre-meshing The Old Drift. Serpell, who was born in Zambia and moved to the United States at the age of nine, won the Caine prize for African writing in 2015 for her short story “The Sack”. N amwali Serpell’s first novel is a rambunctious epic that traces the intertwined histories of three families over three generations.
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