Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

"I guarantee, you've never read a ghost story quite like this before.  In Ward's lush, heart-rending novel - which feels destined to become a classic of literature about the south - a mother and her two children travel north into Mississippi to retrieve the children's father, who has just been released from prison. Along the way, they are haunted by ghosts in various forms.  Ward's language and ability to write in three distinct voices make this a compelling read from start to finish.  One of the year's very best."  - Recommended by Erika

Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel By Jesmyn Ward Cover Image
$27.00
ISBN: 9781501126062
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Scribner - September 5th, 2017

In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. Ward is a major American writer, multiply awarded and universally lauded, and in Sing, Unburied, Sing she is at the height of her powers.

 

Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie's children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.