**Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2020**'The great African novel of the twenty-first century' Tade Thompson, author of Rosewater On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there was once a colonial settlement called The Old Drift.In 1904, in a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles his fate with those of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy.So begins a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond.'Extraordinary, ambitious, evocative, dazzling' Salman Rushdie'Brilliant . . . heartbreaking' Sunday Times 'Charming, heartbreaking and breathtaking' Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House