Ward, Jesmyn / Sing, Unburied, Sing

A furious brew with hints of Toni Morrison and Homer’s “The Odyssey,” Ward’s novel hits full stride when Leonie takes her children and a friend and hits the road to pick up her children’s father, Michael, from prison. On a real and metaphorical road of secrets and sorrows, the story shifts narrators — from Jojo to Leonie to Richie, a doomed boy from his grandfather’s fractured past — as they crash into both the ghosts that stalk them, as well as the disquieting ways these characters haunt themselves."
—Boston Globe

"Ghosts, literal and literary, haunt nearly every page of Sing, Unburied, Sing -- a novel whose boundaries between the living and the dead shift constantly, like smoke or sand. Set on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi (a place rich in oil rigs and atmosphere, if almost nothing else), 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. Grade: A."
-- Entertainment Weekly

May 2018

9781501126079

Paperback

Ward, Jesmyn / Sing, Unburied, Sing