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The Furrows
- Author
- Namwali Serpell
- Publisher
- Random House
- Publish Date
- 25 August 2022
- Run Time
- 8 hours 45 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
I don't want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.
Cassandra Williams is twelve; her little brother Wayne is seven. One day, when they're alone together, there's an accident, and Wayne is lost forever. Though his body is never recovered, their mother can't stop searching. The missing boy cleaves the family with doubt: How do you grieve an absence? And how does it feel?
As C grows older, she relives and retells her story, and she sees her brother everywhere: in cafes, airplane aisles, subway cars. Here is her brother's older face, the light in his eyes, his lanky limbs, the way he seems to recognise her, too. But it can't be, of course. Or can it? And then one day, there's another accident, and C meets a man both mysterious and familiar, a man who's also searching for someone, as well as his own place in the world. His name is Wayne.
Namwali Serpell's piercing new novel captures the ongoing and uncanny experience of grief, as the past breaks over the present, like waves in the sea. The Furrows is a bold exploration of memory and mourning that twists unexpectedly into a masterful story of mistaken identity, slippery reality, black experience, and the wishful and sometimes willful longing for reunion with those we've lost.
© Namwali Serpell 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022
Critics Review
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Serpell is a terrific destabiliser, even at the level of the sentence... There are no tidy moral lessons at the end of her dissonant and time-contorting fable - no bones to bury, no truth to pin, no mysteries solved - only the inescapable rhythms of loss
The Guardian
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A masterfully intelligent and many-sided book
The Telegraph
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The Furrows...confirms Serpell's place as one of the most innovative and intelligent writers today
Financial Times
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In Namwali Serpell's hands, grief is a kind of possession. The Furrows is a piercing, sharply written novel about the conjuring power of loss
Raven Leilani, author of Luster
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Masterful: a blend of self-knowing, sincere and spry... Serpell's sentences are unhurried, yet detailed, smart and brisk
Sunday Telegraph
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Namwali Serpell's deep unity of imagery and voice is at the employ of a wild talent for narrative pivot and surprise; what seems at first a meditation on family trauma unfolds through the urgency of an amnesiac puzzle-thriller, then a violently compelling love story. The final pages take flight with visionary intensity. The Furrows is a genuine tour de force
Jonathan Lethem, author of The Arrest
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Who could have imagined that a novel about loss and long grieving could be so soaring, so sexy, so luminously beautiful and poetic, such a rich and shimmeringly scored piece for three voices?... We are lucky to have this alive, exhilarating novel remind us how inexhaustible and surprising the form is and continues to be
Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others
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What makes The Furrows so thrilling is its ability to constantly surprise and keep us on the edge of our seats. But its real brilliance rests in Namwali Serpell's bold and audacious refusal to allow the complicated layers of guilt and grief to remain unexplored. In this spectacular and genre-bending book, she has permanently shifted the ground beneath us, and where we stand by the end is in a new place where mourning and longing and sensuality not only exist at once, but transform into something revelatory, and perhaps even healing
Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King
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The furrows of grief, in Namwali Serpells's telling, are a surreal and hypnotic fantasy. This book reads like a ghost story, a murder mystery, a thriller, a redemptive love story that never loses its knife edge of danger. A daring and masterful book about how we respond to the mystery of death
Kiran Desai, author of The Inheritance of Loss
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Namwali Serpell has written a stunning and highly original novel exploring the erotic shadow-life of grief. In Serpell's hands, longing becomes a story of uncanny repetition, and the logic of dreams feels intensely, compellingly real
Isabella Hammad, author of The Parisian
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Namwali Serpell
- Narrator
- Dion Graham, Ryan Vincent Anderson, Kristen Ariza
- Duration
- 8 hours 45 minutes
- Release Date
- 25 August 2022
- ISBN
- 9781529901764
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Random House
- Genre
- Modern and contemporary fiction: literary and general, Narrative theme: death, grief, loss, Narrative theme: love / relationships, Family life fiction / Stories about family, Narrative theme: identity / belonging
Synopsis
Brought to you by Penguin.I don't want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.Cassandra Williams is twelve; her little brother Wayne is seven. One day, when they're alone together, there's an accident, and Wayne is lost forever. Though his body is never recovered, their mother can't stop searching. The missing boy cleaves the family with doubt: How do you grieve an absence? And how does it feel?As C grows older, she relives and retells her story, and she sees her brother everywhere: in cafes, airplane aisles, subway cars. Here is her brother's older face, the light in his eyes, his lanky limbs, the way he seems to recognise her, too. But it can't be, of course. Or can it? And then one day, there's another accident, and C meets a man both mysterious and familiar, a man who's also searching for someone, as well as his own place in the world. His name is Wayne.Namwali Serpell's piercing new novel captures the ongoing and uncanny experience of grief, as the past breaks over the present, like waves in the sea. The Furrows is a bold exploration of memory and mourning that twists unexpectedly into a masterful story of mistaken identity, slippery reality, black experience, and the wishful and sometimes willful longing for reunion with those we've lost.© Namwali Serpell 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022
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