New York Times critic Dwight Garner calls THE OLD DRIFT one of the best books of 2019. “An intimate, brainy, gleaming epic . . . The plot pivots gracefully from accounts of the region’s early white colonizers and despoilers through the worst years of the AIDS crisis. It pushes into the near future, proposing a world in which flocking bug-size microdrones are a) fantastically cool and b) put to chilling totalitarian purposes. Serpell seems to want to stuff the entire world into her novel — biology, race, subjugation, revolutionary politics, technology — but it retains a human scale.” Hogarth published the book on March 26, 2019.