LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018 WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2017 ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2017
Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur 'Genius' Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency and the Strauss Living Prize. She is the first female author to win two National Book Awards for Fiction, for Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones (2011). She is also the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time, the author of the memoir Men We Reaped and the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds. She is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi. @jesmimi
This wrenching new novel by Jesmyn Ward digs deep into the
not-buried heart of the American nightmare. A must
*Twitter*
A novel as blazingly hymn-like as the title suggests
*New Statesman 'Books of the Year'*
Beautiful in every sense ... Her characters feel wholly true ...
Long after the end, we continue to worry after them, love them in
spite of their faults, and feel their pain
*Spectator*
Hauntingly lyrical
*Mail on Sunday*
A powerfully alive novel haunted by ghosts; a road trip where
people can go but they can never leave; a visceral and intimate
drama that plays out like a grand epic, Sing, Unburied, Sing is
staggering
*Marlon James, Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2015*
The connection between the injustices of the past and the
desperation of present are clearly drawn in Sing, Unburied, Sing, a
book that charts the lines between the living and the dead, the
loving and the broken. I am a huge fan of Jesmyn Ward’s work, and
this book proves that she is one of the most important writers in
America today
*Ann Patchett*
Ward is a lyrical, visceral storyteller, one who is as adept at
conveying the tenderness of sibling love as the terror and
brutality of racist violence
*Daily Mail*
Blazing with power, grief and tenderness, Jesmyn Ward’s third novel
breathes danger into the classic American road trip … What might,
in less sure hands, have remained a local tale, makes a searing
story of universal power … Ward takes the territory made so
familiar by writers such as William Faulkner or Eudora Welty, and
reclaims it
*Financial Times*
Ghosts, the voices of the dying, painful journeys across an
unforgiving country. This is Faulkner territory. Ward’s updated
version is gruesomely fascinating, especially as she rounds out her
story with characters of real-world complexity … Her cool handling
of the mythical tropes of journeying and listening to ancestral
voices makes this a harrowing, essential novel for our times
*The Times*
Maybe that’s the miracle here: that ordinary people whose lives
have become so easy to classify into categories like rural poor,
drug-dependent, products of the criminal justice system, possess
the weight and the value of the mythic … Such feats of empathy are
difficult, all too often impossible to muster in real life. But
they feel genuinely inevitable when offered by a writer of such
lyric imagination as Ward
*New York Times Book Review*
Ward's prose is characterised by its lyrical beauty: woven
throughout are precise, elegant registrations of sensory
impression, miniature epiphanies that momentarily lift us from the
immediate situation ... undeniably well-executed
*Sunday Times*
It is rich, sometimes unbearably so ... The signal characteristic
of Ward’s prose is its lyricism ... the effect is hypnotic ...
This, and her ease with vernacular language, puts Ward in
fellowship with such forebears as Zora Neale Hurston and William
Faulkner ... The tone and atmosphere in “Sing, Unburied, Sing” call
out, too, to Toni Morrison—particularly “Beloved,” whose most
sorrowful revelations are echoed in the climax of “Sing”
*New Yorker*
Combines aspects of the American road novel and the ghost story
with an exploration of the long aftershocks of a hurricane
*New York Times Book Review*
Most effective as a poetic critique of US history ... A brooding,
pained meditation on the proposition, spelled out by Colson
Whitehead in The Underground Railroad, that “America is a ghost in
the darkness”’
*Guardian*
The heir to Faulkner
*Time*
However eternal its concerns, “Sing, Unburied, Sing" is perfectly
poised for the moment
*New York Times*
One of the most powerfully poetic writers in the country ...
Readers may be reminded of the trapped spirits in George Saunders’s
recent novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” but Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”
is a more direct antecedent
*Washington Post*
Speaks to maintaining hope in the face of one’s plight, and the
true strength (and fragility) of familial bonds
*Buzzfeed*
An unforgettable novel about race, love and history
*Elle*
Sing, Unburied, Sing is a road novel turned on its head, and a
family story with its feet to the fire. Lyric and devastating,
Ward's unforgettable characters straddle past and present in this
spellbinding return to the rural Mississippi of her first book.
You'll never read anything like it
*Ayana Mathis, author of 'The Twelve Tribes of Hattie'*
A searing, urgent read for anyone who thinks the shadows of slavery
and Jim Crow have passed, and anyone who assumes the ghosts of the
past are easy to placate. It’s hard to imagine a more necessary
book for this political era
*Celeste Ng, author of 'Little Fires Everywhere' and 'Everything I
Never Told You'*
In prose that is simultaneously luminous and achingly honest, Ward
captures moments of beauty, tenderness, and resilience against a
bleak landscape of crushing poverty, racism, addiction, and
incarceration
*MacArthur Foundation*
If Sing, Unburied, Sing is proof of anything, it’s that when it
comes to spinning poetic tales of love and family, and the social
metastasis that often takes place but goes unspoken of in
marginalized communities—let alone the black American South—Jesmyn
Ward is, by far, the best doing it today. Another masterpiece
*Jason Reynolds, author of 'Ghost'*
Staggering ... A furious brew with hints of Toni Morrison and
Homer’s 'The Odyssey'
*Boston Globe*
The terrible beauty of life along the nation’s lower margins is
summoned in this bold, bright, and sharp-eyed road novel … As with
the best and most meaningful American fiction these days, old
truths are recast here in new realities rife with both peril and
promise
*Kirkus*
Her lyrical prose takes on, alternately, the tones of a road novel
and a ghost story ... [Sing, Unburied, Sing] establishes Ward as
one of the most poetic writers in the conversation about America’s
unfinished business in the black South
*Atlantic*
[A] tour de force ... Ward is an attentive and precise writer who
dazzles with natural and supernatural observations and lyrical
details ... she continues telling stories we need to hear with rare
clarity and power
*O, the Oprah Magazine*
Electric ... a harrowing panorama of the rural South
*L.A. Review of Books*
A tale that shimmers
*Mother Jones*
Ward’s tale is an emotional, political and spiritual powerhouse
that unblinkingly underlines America’s heinous treatment of black
people – from slavery to the present day … while it’s a book filled
with savagery, there is also tenderness, love and hope. You can
feel the energy buzzing between its covers
*Emerald Street*
If you only read a single novel this month, make it Jesmyn Ward's
utterly brilliant Sing, Unburied, Sing
*Vogue*
The book’s Southern gothic aura recalls the dense, head-spinning
prose of William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor. But the voice is
entirely Ward's own, a voluptuous magical realism that takes root
in the darkest corners of human behavior ... Ward, whose Salvage
the Bones won a National Book Award, has emerged as one of the most
searing and singularly gifted writers working today
*Entertainment Weekly*
Gorgeous ... Always clear-eyed, Ward knows history is a nightmare.
But she insists all the same that we might yet awaken and sing
*Chicago Tribune*
In this lush and lonely novel, Ward lets the dead sing. It's a kind
of burial
*NPR*
Very beautiful
*Vox*
Poetic and powerful
*Pride Magazine*
An American road novel transplanted to 21st century rural America,
looking at race, belonging and how the past can never be left
behind. Utterly captivating, this is a special book that will make
your heart and soul ache
*Stylist*
It should come as no surprise that the novel has garnered
comparisons to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Echoes of Faulkner nestle
amongst Ward’s pages too. … Ward’s prose drips with poetry, even at
the novel’s darkest moments
*The White Review*
This is the most grittily realistic book I’ve read in a while - it
just happens to be a ghost story. Somehow, despite its fantastical
content, Sing, Unburied, Sing feels distinctly believable … But
it’s the love that shines incandescently from the pages here,
blasting through all the oppressive threat and tension and lighting
the novel up from within
*Shiny New Books*
Recommended by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Marlon James,
Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel is one of Autumn’s must-reads ... Part
road novel, part ghost story, this is a powerful exploration of
race and the way the past
*Anothermag*
The civil liberty struggles faced by Americans today, and the
country’s history are reflected in Ward’s affecting prose
*The i*
Themes of drug addiction and child abuse feature in this powerful
tale, with ghostly figures from the past returning to admonish
Leonie for the choices she has made in her life … impressive
*Bristol Post*
The cult read: Sing, Unburied, Sing won the National Book Award
this year. It feels particularly timely, centring on a family road
trip through a fractured Mississippi
*Sunday Times Style*
Ward’s third book set in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, based
on her hometown of DeLisle, Miss., conjures the same raw emotion of
her previous works, like the Hurricane Katrina novel Salvage the
Bones. But this time, a sense of magical realism deepens the
ghostly sense of the past reaching out to touch – or even strangle
– the present. Ward’s novel is a true triple threat, expert in
prose, human observation and social commentary
*Time Magazine*
Full of haunted, lyrical beauty
*Guardian Australia*
Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the long shadow cast by slavery
in the American South – not just the cycles of inherited trauma and
alienation, but the mass incarceration of black men today … In this
novel Ward shows again that she can place harsh truths about
America’s racial problems within a gorgeous, lyrical tale
*Prospect*
Jesmyn Ward is an important new voice of the American South – one
developing, perhaps, into the twenty-first-century’s answer to
William Faulkner. Fiercely partisan yet unillusioned, she displays
an impressive understand of politics and idiom. But perhaps most
striking is her sustained and clear-eyed attention to people who,
when noticed at all, are more usually consigned to a novel’s
periphery. Here they take centre stage and are depicted with the
kind of piercing clarity born of love
*Times Literary Supplement*
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