Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in San Francisco.
She won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing for her story, "The Sack." In 2014, she was chosen as one of the Africa 39, a Hay Festival project to identify the most promising African writers under 40.
The Lions' Den (2024) Iris Mwanza "An evocative, touching and - in multiple senses - moving portrait of Zambian life and politics at a moment of great transformation."
Choice (2024) Neel Mukherjee "A magnificent accomplishment. In each panel of this masterful triptych-or each movement of this classical sonata-exquisite prose gradually crescendos to jaw-dropping revelations... Choice is a deeply human novel, and a humane one... We come to realize, to feel through experiencing the successive waves of the novel's movements, that a human life is not simply the result of rational choices but rather, as Neel Mukherjee puts it, the lull between them-a rich and swaying lull, thick with love and responsibility."
Headshot (2024) Rita Bullwinkel "Headshot is just that-a shot to the head, a cumulative wallop to the senses. Bullwinkel's prose jabs, spars, feints, floats, stings, and slowly floods us with the force of the fact: time and will can make the dust of an ordinary life sparkle."
Same Bed Different Dreams (2023) Ed Park "Same Bed Different Dreams is a kaleidoscope of Koreamericana; a crowd of cracked voices; a gorgeous, hilarious, provisional dream; a wonder."
Brooklyn Crime Novel (2023) Jonathan Lethem "Brooklyn Crime Novel isn't what it says it is. In fact, it takes apart the three words of its title, even as it takes each of them very seriously. It loosens the knot that is Brooklyn, city of tangled streets, lost oases, and false fronts. It interrogates what a Crime is - a dance? an exchange? a deal gone wrong? a funny mugging? And it opens up what a Novel can be. This is no soul-affirming flight; no apotheosis of 'where I'm from'; no prettified, gentrified tale of trauma; nor is it a winky metafictional gambit; nor a self-important autofictional one. Brooklyn Crime Novel is an inquiry and a tragedy, and as with the oldest crime story ever written, Oedipus Rex, the judge, detective, victim, and accused are one and the same. A deeply moving, fiercely intelligent, and acerbically funny novel about the scandal and disaster of American capital in our time."
Digging Stars (2023) Novuyo Rosa Tshuma "Digging Stars is an extraordinarily unique portrait. The real stars of this canny undoing of the hubris of settler futurism are Novuyo Rosa Tshuma's disarmingly brilliant words."
Mobility (2023) Lydia Kiesling "Mobility is a beautifully written and stunningly smart novel. It's a deeply engrossing, politically astute tale of the intricacies and intimacies of our daily complicity with late capital, with the collective bargain we've all made to count calories and coins while the world burns."
Hangman (2023) Maya Binyam "A strikingly masterful debut. With a slow, sure hand, Hangman beckons you into a zone that at first seems as clear, as blank, and as eerily sunny as the pane of a window. Then it traps you there, until you notice the blots, bubbles, and fissures in the glass-and then the frame itself, then the shatter. A clean, sharp, piercing-and deeply political-novel."
The Possibilities (2023) Yael Goldstein-Love "The Possibilities had me intrigued, then gripped, and by its end, greatly moved by its exploration of the quite literally existential stakes of loving another person. Within hours of finishing this novel, I found myself quoting it in conversation. . . . A bravura, unforgettable performance."
Enter Ghost (2023) Isabella Hammad "Enter Ghost is a masterful, deeply convincing portrait of the all-too-real consequences of political theater - in both senses. A moving and important novel that presses upon the urgent question of how we ought to live in the midst of the rubble (and ongoing chaos) of political crisis."
Call and Response (2023) Gothataone Moeng "Call and Response is a beautiful collection. What sharply observed vignettes - linked by striking figures, vivid details, a wry and ruminative mood, and deep insight into the vicissitudes of family life. They reminded me sometimes of the work of Anton Chekhov, sometimes that of Bessie Head: calm, wise, yet searching, restless, like a still pond bestirred by undercurrents, or in Moeng's lambent words, 'like a torchlight helpless over the vast velvet of night.'"
Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost (2021) David Hoon Kim "An elegant book, shot through with eeriness and intelligence. A genuinely spooky, strange, and compulsive read, like walking through a cemetery and reading the tombstones while the eyes of crows watch your back."
The Fugitivities (2021) Jesse McCarthy "A gorgeous, virtuosic novel. In exquisite, often ecstatic, prose, McCarthy gives us a portrait of the artist as a black man—or rather, as a set of young black men, brothers and friends and rivals. This is blackness as it collides with class and love. Blackness in its uneasy relationship to Europe and the Americas. Blackness in all of its inner intricacy, tension, and beauty. Blackness shattered from the inside, each facet spinning, in McCarthy's own words, in "a hypnotic dance like shards in a kaleidoscope."
The First Woman (2020) Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi "The First Woman is a wonder, as clear, vivid, moving, powerful, and captivatingly unpredictable as water itself... With wry wisdom, great humor, and deep complexity, Makumbi has created a feminist coming-of-age classic for the ages."
