The Old Drift Audiobook (Free)

Random Home presents the audiobook model of The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell, browse by Adjoa Andoh, Richard E. Offer and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith.

Electrifying, playful, ambitious, outstanding – a Zambian debut book that follows three generations of three families, telling the storyplot of a country, and of the grand sweep of your time

‘It’s difficult to think about another novel that is at once thus sweepingly ambitious therefore intricately patterned, providing the pleasures of saga and poetry in equal measure..LEARNING MUCH MORE about The Old Drift The Aged Drift can be an endlessly innovative, voraciously outstanding publication, and Namwali Serpell is among the most distinctive and interesting authors to emerge in years.’ Garth Greenwell

Over the banks from the Zambezi River, a few miles from your majestic Victoria Falls, there was once a colonial negotiation called The Old Drift. Here starts the epic tale of a little African nation, told by a inexplicable swarm-like chorus that calls itself man’s best nemesis. The story? A playful panorama of history, fairytale, love and technology fiction. The moral? To err can be human.

In 1904, within a smoky area on the hotel over the river, a vintage Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a blunder that entangles the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. This sets off a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families (dark, white, brown) because they collide and converge over the course of the hundred years, into the present and beyond. As the years pass, their lives – their triumphs, errors, losses and expectations – type 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 time and the world, subverting expectations on the way. Exploding with color and energy, The Aged Drift is certainly a testament to our yearning to make and cross edges, and a deep breathing on the sluggish, grand duration of time.