The perfect last-minute gift Shop credit bundles

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

The Old Drift

Due to publisher restrictions, this audiobook is unavailable for purchase in your selected country.

Unavailable due to DRM restrictions

This audiobook is not for sale because it is not DRM-free (DRM stands for Digital Rights Management). Offering audiobooks with restricted digital rights is not consistent with our values. Learn more

Length 24 hours 59 minutes

Language English

Narrators Adjoa Andoh, Richard E. Grant & Kobna Holdbrook-Smith

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more

Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

Summary
About the author

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell, read by Adjoa Andoh, Richard E. Grant and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith.

Electrifying, playful, ambitious, brilliant – a Zambian debut novel that follows three generations of three families, telling the story of a nation, and of the grand sweep of time

'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

On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there was once a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. Here begins the epic story of a small African nation, told by a mysterious swarm-like chorus that calls itself man’s greatest nemesis. The tale? A playful panorama of history, fairytale, romance and science fiction. The moral? To err is human.

In 1904, in a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. This sets off a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families (black, white, brown) as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond. As the generations pass, their lives – their triumphs, errors, losses and hopes – form a symphony about what it means to be human.

From a woman covered with hair and another plagued with endless tears, to forbidden love affairs and fiery political ones, to homegrown technological marvels like Afronauts, microdrones and viral vaccines – this gripping, unforgettable novel sweeps over the years and the globe, subverting expectations along the way. Exploding with colour and energy, The Old Drift is a testament to our yearning to create and cross borders, and a meditation on the slow, grand passage of time.

Fiction Romance Science Fiction Historical Fiction Fiction - Literary

Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. She has received a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction, the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, and a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, and the Los Angeles Times' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; it was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review and one of Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of the Year. Her nonfiction book, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Her short story, 'Take It', was a finalist for the 2020 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. She is a Professor of English at Harvard.

Audiobook details

Author:
Namwali Serpell

Narrators:
Adjoa Andoh, Richard E. Grant & Kobna Holdbrook-Smith

ISBN:
9781473568792

Length:
24 hours 59 minutes

Language:
English

Publisher:
Random House

Publication date:
March 28, 2019

Edition:
Unabridged

Reviews

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 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 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 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 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 Brilliantly inventive 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 A vast, ambitious and polyphonous debut novel by a writer whose criticism and short stories I’ve admired for years 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 This mesmerizing début 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.” Expand reviews

The perfect last-minute gift Shop credit bundles

Almost ready!

The perfect last-minute gift

Get two free audiobooks!

The Old Drift

This audiobook uses AI narration.

Almost ready!

Audiobook details

The perfect last-minute gift

Get two free audiobooks!

Reviews