Hey, it's End Pair's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Now, Mawley Serpels' new book,

The Furrows, is one of those hot new literary fiction books people have been waiting for.

You know, you've got folks from publishers weekly and Kirkus calling it brilliant and breathtaking and all that.

Sirpel is one of those writers that seem to come out of the gate fully formed.

Her 2019 debut novel, The Old Drift, was this huge, ambitious epic that follows these families

through generations, and it won a couple awards, including the UK's top prize for science fiction.

We'll talk about her new one in a bit, but first, I want that to play for you

our interview about that first book. When she talked to NPR Scott, Simon, she told them

about how she was interested in the arbitrariness of borders and how mixed families can

create their own cultures. In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, sources and methods.

NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people, helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.

Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Old Drift is a real saga of a story that intertwines strangers into families, which will

follow for a century, magic into everyday moments, and the story of a nation, Zambia,

the former Northern Rhodesia that's both caught up in

and created in the currents of history. The Old Drift is the debut novel from Nomuali Serpo,

a Zambian writer who's won many prizes for fiction and been published in The New Yorker and

McSweeney's. She now teaches at the University of California

at Berkeley and joins us from KQED in San Francisco. Thanks so much for being with us.

Thank you for having me. The story that you tell opens with a fateful encounter in 1904,

would-be photographer in a hotel lobby who stumbles. What begins to happen then?

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