Books by Namwali Serpell
“Namwali Serpell won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction in 2020 for her rowdy, polyphonous speculative novel The Old Drift. She returns now with The Furrows, an elegiac and uncanny story of grief, unreliable memories and mistaken identity. When Cee Williams watches her brother Wayne die in her arms, aged 12, something so powerful passes between them that she passes out; when she awakes, his body is gone. This lost brother haunts her for the rest of her life, appearing in the faces of strangers, and dying over and over again in her mind. The Financial Times said that it ‘confirms Serpell’s place as one of the most innovative and intelligent writers today.'” Read more...
Notable New Novels of Fall 2022
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“This came out in 2019, and it was a phenomenal debut – it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. It’s set in Zambia. It’s organized as a set of multiple stories following different people, members of several families with intertwining stories, over three generations: the grandmothers, the mothers, and the daughters…What makes it science fantasy to me – and I don’t think that phrase was used to describe it at the time very much, but I’m applying it – is that this book commits very deeply to both the fantastical and science fictional devices in these different narratives.” Read more...
Vajra Chandrasekera, Novelist
Interviews where books by Namwali Serpell were recommended
The Best Science Fantasy, recommended by Vajra Chandrasekera
We use ‘science fantasy’ when a book seems to be both science fiction and fantasy. What distinguishes the two, and what does it mean to combine them? These books are an opportunity to explore our ways of knowing, reflect changing cultures, and find humour in the unexpected, says award-winning fantasy and sci fi author Vajra Chandrasekera.
The Best Science Fiction of 2020, recommended by Tom Hunter
Sci fi is booming, says Tom Hunter, the director of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, as he discusses their 2020 shortlist: six novels that embrace classic sci fi narratives, while subverting or reimagining them for a contemporary audience.
Notable New Novels of Fall 2022, recommended by Cal Flyn
Fall is a busy time in publishing, as the biggest names in fiction prepare to release new books in the months leading up to Christmas. Here, Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn rounds up some of the most notable novels of Fall 2022—including two new books from the great American novelist Cormac McCarthy and a sumptuous work of historical fiction from Maggie O’Farrell.
