The Furrows
United States

The Furrows

by Namwali Serpell

Family & Heritage Literary Fiction Fiction 2022

Summary

“I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.”

When Cassandra Williams, known as C, is twelve years old, her seven-year-old brother, Wayne, disappears during a swimming accident. His body is never found, leaving C trapped in a grief complicated by guilt and unanswered questions. Their mother refuses to abandon hope and dedicates herself to searching for missing children, while their father eventually leaves the family. As C grows older, the loss refuses to remain in the past: she begins seeing Wayne everywhere, recognising his face in strangers on trains, in cafés, and in crowded streets. Then she meets a man who shares her brother’s name and seems connected to the mystery of her loss. Moving between perspectives and shifting versions of reality, Namwali Serpell explores how grief distorts memory and how the stories we tell ourselves can become inseparable from what we believe to be true. Both intimate and formally adventurous, The Furrows is a haunting meditation on sibling love, racial identity, and the impossible desire to recover those we have lost.

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Country
United States
North America
About the author
Namwali Serpell
Namwali Serpell

Namwali Serpell (born 1980) is a Zambian-American novelist, essayist, and literary scholar, born in Lusaka, Zambia. She studied at Yale University and earned a PhD in English from Harvard University before pursuing an academic career. Her writing is known for its intellectual ambition, formal experimentation, and exploration of race, identity, technology, and the legacies of colonialism. Serpell first attracted international attention with her short story The Sack, which won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing. Her debut novel, The Old Drift (2019), established her as a major contemporary literary voice and received several prestigious awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her later works include Stranger Faces, a collection of essays examining how we perceive unfamiliar faces and bodies, and The Furrows, a novel exploring grief and memory. Serpell is a professor of English at Harvard University, where her scholarship and creative work examine the possibilities of contemporary literature.

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Details
Published
2022
Author
Namwali Serpell