Namwali Serpell

From the winner of the Caine Prize comes the Great Zambian novel you didn't know you were waiting for Namwali Serpell's ground-shaking debut novel is an epic story of three generations of three Zambian families - one black, one brown and one white. Unfolding over 200 years, but set mainly in the twentieth century, one family begins in Italy, another in England and the third in Zambia. The three families' lives become entwined as each is plagued by a curse passed on down the generations. Hugely ambitious, each of the three 'books' that make up the novel - The Grandmothers, The Mothers, The Children - engages with a different genre of writing, satirizing the kind of language historically used to describe Africa, whilst celebrating the diversity and hybridity of African culture. Playful, full of humour and utterly captivating in its storytelling - this is a colossal novel that you can live in. Sprawling out across time and space, it recalls One Hundred Years of Solitudeby Gabriel Garcia Marquez, animating a culture that cannot escape its colonial past, but which yearns for greatness.

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. 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 his fate with those of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. So begins a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond.