The Furrows A Novel

How do you grieve an absence? A brilliantly inventive novel about loss and belonging, from the award-winning author of The Old Drift.

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022—Vulture, Lit Hub, Electric Lit, BookPage

I don’t want to tell you what happened; I want to tell you how it felt.
 
Cassandra Williams is twelve, and her little brother Wayne is seven. One day, when they’re alone together, an accident happens and Wayne is lost forever. Or so it seems. Though his body is never recovered, their mother, unable to give up hope, launches an organization dedicated to missing children. Their father simply leaves, starts another family somewhere else.

As C grows older, she sees her brother everywhere: in coffee shops, airplane aisles, subways cars, cities on either coast. Here is her brother’s older face, the light in his eyes, his lanky limbs, the way he seems to recognize her too. But it can’t be, of course. Or can it? Disaster strikes again and C meets a man both mysterious and strangely familiar, a man who is also searching for someone, as well as his own place in the world. His name is Wayne.

Namwali Serpell’s remarkable novel captures the ongoing and uncanny experience of grief—the past breaking over the present like waves in the sea. The Furrows is a bold and beautiful exploration of memory and mourning that twists unexpectedly into a masterful story of black identity, double consciousness, and the wishful and sometimes willful longing for reunion with those we've lost.

Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. She received a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize, the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, and a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, and the Los Angeles Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; it was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review and one of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of the Year. Her nonfiction book, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. She is a professor of English at Harvard.