But when I say all the time, I mean for 50 years continuously, which obviously has. One of them cries all the time because she's had her heart broken.

And so I started writing about these women. I was very enamored with the writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in particular, Maria Luisa Bombal, who was a Chilean novelist who Borges called the mother of magical realism. SIMON: I'm interested in some of your characters with magical qualities - for example, a woman enveloped in her own hair. So this interaction between these three men ends up setting off a kind of chain of relation between their three families that slowly whirls and swirls down, like a vortex, until we reach the final descendants, which is a love triangle of three people and - who are also trying to start a political revolution in a future Zambia - in Zambia of the 2020s. A butterfly effect is one way to put it, where a small incident, a small slip, a small error, a small mistake can cause these much larger consequences as time passes. SIMON: I guess this is not a metaphorical reminder but a literal reminder that life is all about unexpected occurrences and consequences, isn't it? Her daughter reaches out in anger and hits a young, African busboy, a Tonga man named N'gulube, who's also a historical figure who is mentioned in Percy Clark's memoir, 'Autobiography Of An Old Drifter.' And this causes a small flurry of activity as Pietro's wife rushes to his side. So Percy grabs Pietro's - reaches for his hat but pulls off a chunk of his hair. SERPELL: So Percy Clark, who's the historical figure - a British photographer who is trying to make his fortunes in the middle of Africa - he accidentally reaches out for an Italian hotelier named Pietro Gavuzzi, who was, historically, the first hotel manager of the Victoria Falls Hotel. SIMON: The story that you tell opens with a fateful encounter in 1904 - a would-be photographer in a hotel lobby who stumbles. NAMWALI SERPELL: Thank you for having me. She now teaches at the University of California at Berkeley and joins us from KQED in San Francisco. 'The Old Drift' is the debut novel from Namwali Serpell, a Zambian writer who's won many prizes for fiction and been published in The New Yorker and McSweeney's. 'The Old Drift' is a real saga of a story that intertwines strangers into families, which we'll 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 characters