It spans a couple of centuries and tracks three families over four generations, animating the events of Zambian history with Namwali’s unique application of obsessive research, beautiful prose, playful genre-blending, and futurecasting. Namwali’s book, out March 26, is a massive multi-generational novel 20 years in the making. She had just read mine, The Golden State, and I had a chance to read an early copy of hers, The Old Drift. We bonded over the joyful agony of publishing our debut novels, which we exchanged. when she was 8, and then back to Zambia when she was 15 for a shorter stint). Over the next six months, we had a series of friend dates and conversations about reading, writing, and our respective upbringings moving between continents (I’m a foreign service brat Namwali was born in Zambia, moved to the U.S. Over the course of the evening, which involved karaoke, it became clear that I had met a kindred spirit, a writer and reader with a deeply held appreciation for ‘90s hits (no anti-Alanis sentiments here) and genre fiction, which she was teaching to her students at UC Berkeley. I met Namwali Serpell last fall while we both hovered over the cheese plate at an event at the Ruby, a women’s co-working space in San Francisco. Photo: Penguin Random House, Peg Korpinski
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