Cal Revely-Calder

THE FURROWS by Namwali Serpell 266pp, Chatto & Windus, £16.99

★★★★★

Cassandra, a young American, is outdoors with her younger brother when from nowhere, he’s gone – killed in an accident. She grows up haunted by the memory, and while some details remain the same – she was 12, Wayne was seven – others begin to blur. Was it a drowning or a hit-and-run? Was a man in a blue jacket involved? Will their parents accept that Wayne is dead, not “missing” – and what would acceptance mean? Cassandra sees men who could be her brother, hears his name whispered in subway cars. Some questions escape an answer, but love is a refusal to stop the chase.

The Furrows is the second novel by Namwali Serpell – an AmericanZambian writer who’s also a lecturer and essayist – and it could have been maudlin and repetitive, as fictional grief too often is. Instead, it’s masterful: a blend of the self-knowing, sincere and spry. “Room for error is room for play,” Serpell has written elsewhere, and when, at the book’s halfway point, Cassandra meets a man whose Wayne-ness she can’t ignore, she has the sensation that it’s all a “game for which I alone have been chosen”. She isn’t depressed by the thought, but “buoyed”. That man’s name, suspiciously and tantalisingly, will soon be revealed as Wayne, and their lives become tangled up.

Serpell’s sentences are unhurried, yet detailed, smart and brisk – two cigarette-tips “kiss and smoulder”; life underwater is “the colour of shadow” – while her narrative is coolly controlled, cradling Cassandra’s emotions as they unpick and reverse themselves.

Grief always leads to storytelling: here, the brother’s death is relived repeatedly, and it’s different every time.

“I don’t want to tell you what happened,” Cassandra always begins, to herself, her family, the second Wayne. “I want to tell you how it felt.”