“The Old Drift,” Namwali Serpell’s big-in-every-way 2019 debut novel, covers more than a century in the lives of three families in Zambia, the author’s birthplace. At more than 560 pages, the book demands, and earns, a significant commitment from even the speediest reader. “Imagine the equation, or picture the graph, of the Archimedean spiral,” Serpell, a Harvard English professor, writes in the novel’s closing paragraph. “This is the turning that unrolls the day, that turns the turns that the seasons obey, and the cycle of years, and the decades.” The novel progresses in a similar fashion, with lives deliberately twisting forward and around one another.
