Unfortunately, as a storm suddenly intensified, Wayne mysteriously vanished, and Cee finds herself burdened with the blame for his apparent death.

"If The Old Drift put Serpell in conversation with Rushdie and García Márquez, The Furrows seems to stand on the shoulders of Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison.

Instead, Serpell gives exactly what she tells us at the outset, a stunningly acute depiction of how the endless layers of both grief and absence, the impossibly slippery act of trying to be a person, feel.

"[5] "In The Furrows, Serpell code-switches with ease, an ultimately crucial skill in a story that abounds with fluctuating realities.

The book swerves from a realistic chronicle that bears all the markers of a grief tale to one that seems infused with magic, from standard-English dialogue to a pitch-perfect rendering of African American Vernacular English.

Serpell also references and builds upon pop culture's alternate-reality obsession, and the narrative vertigo that these stories induce in us.

When I began reading the novel, I knew that Wayne had drowned in the ocean—but the power of Serpell's storytelling was such that as the narrative progressed, I stopped being so sure.