Sing, Unburied, Sing

Jesmyn Ward First published 2017

About this book

**A SEARING AND PROFOUND SOUTHERN ODYSSEY BY NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER JESMYN WARD**

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 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 for Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.

*Sing, Unburied, Sing* grapples with the truths at the heart of the American story and the power and limitations of the bonds of family. Rich with Ward's distinctive, musical language, *Sing, Unburied, Sing* is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature.

This description comes from the 2017 Scribner edition.

Subjects

  • african american
  • african american families
  • african americans, fiction
  • book club selection
  • children of drug addicts
  • coming of age
  • drug addicts
  • fiction
  • fiction / african american / general
  • fiction / coming of age
  • fiction, family life
  • fiction / literary
  • general
  • grandparents as parents
  • large type books
  • literary
  • mississippi, fiction
  • new york times bestseller
  • new york times reviewed
  • nyt:hardcover-fiction=2017-10-15
  • racially mixed children
  • suspense fiction