The Furrows

"In Namwali Serpell's hands, grief is a kind of possession. The Furrows is a piercing, sharply written novel about the conjuring power of loss."  -  Raven Leilani

Cassandra Williams is twelve; her little brother, Wayne, is seven. One day, when they're alone together, there is an accident and Wayne is lost forever. His body is never recovered. The missing boy cleaves the family with doubt. Their father leaves, starts another family elsewhere. But their mother can't give up hope and launches an organization dedicated to missing children. 

Then one day, in another accident, Cassandra meets a man both mysterious and familiar, a man who is also searching for someone and for his own place in the world. His name is Wayne.

“A genuine tour de force... What seems at first a meditation on family trauma unfolds through the urgency of an amnesiac puzzle-thriller, then a violently compelling love story.”  -  Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn

The Furrows is a bold exploration of memory and mourning that twists unexpectedly into a masterful story of mistaken identity, slippery reality, black experience, and the wishful and sometimes wilful longing for reunion with those we've lost.