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Let Us Descend
Jesmyn Ward
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Description for Let Us Descend
Paperback.
* AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK *
‘A spectacular achievement’ ANTHONY DOERR
‘Extravagantly beautiful’ DAILY MAIL
‘One of the greatest writers of all time’ JACQUELINE WOODSON
‘Extraordinary’ GUARDIAN
‘The best book I’ve read in years’ LOUISE KENNEDY
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The first weapon I ever held was my mother's hand.
On a slave plantation in the Carolinas, Annis has survived in the light of her mother’s resilience, comforted by stories of her African warrior grandmother. Everything she knows, she learned from her mother – how to fight, how to be strong, how to grow up in a ... Read moreworld shrouded in darkness.
When she is sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, Annis must venture onward through the rich but unforgiving landscapes of the American South alone: from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans, and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Searching for relief in memories of her mother, she opens herself to a world beyond her own, teeming with spirits of earth, water, history and myth.
A reimagining of American slavery as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching, Let Us Descend offers a magnificent portrait of the strength of the human spirit and its ability to emerge from darkness into light. This is a story of beauty, love, rebirth and reclamation – a masterwork for the ages.
Praise for Sing, Unburied, Sing
‘A must’ Margaret Atwood
‘One of the most important writers in America today’ Ann Patchett
‘Ward is a lyrical, visceral storyteller’ Daily Mail
‘A searing, urgent read’ Celeste Ng
‘Plays out like a grand epic … Staggering’ Marlon James
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Product Details
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
About Jesmyn Ward
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, the Strauss Living Prize and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing, and is the winner of two ... Read moreNational Book Awards for Fiction for both Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones. She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi. Show Less
Reviews for Let Us Descend
I have read all of Jesmyn Ward’s books and have been a fan of her writing for years. Let Us Descend is a vital work for our culture and I’m so excited to have her newest offering as part of our Book Club
Oprah Winfrey An extraordinary novel ... As in all of Ward’s novels, the writing is both ... Read morelyrical and sharply controlled
Guardian
A poetic book about slavery … Ward’s writing is like a spirit that flits and flies ... While also going deep into the rich inner world that sustains [Annis]
Financial Times, Critic's Pick: Best Books of 2023
This harrowing, extravagantly beautiful novel at times seems to hover halfway between the real world and the spirit one. A sublime work
Daily Mail
Elegiac ... Let Us Descend is recounted with a lyrical economy
Times Literary Supplement
Ward’s specificity about the horrors of that journey – the beatings, the rapes, the near drownings, the actual drownings – is brutal. But there is also beauty: she has a poet’s ear and her repetition of phrases and conjunctions is hypnotic ... Just as Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead used black spiritual traditions in their writing, so does Ward ... This skein of hope is what keeps one reading’
Spectator
Jesmyn Ward is one of the greatest writers of all time. And Let Us Descend, once again, proves it
Jacqueline Woodson, author of RED AT THE BONE Exquisite, harrowing, elemental, transcendent and ultimately hopeful. The best book I’ve read in years. What a writer Jesmyn Ward is!
Louise Kennedy, author of TRESPASSES Ward resurrects an enslaved girl out of the lost folds of the antebellum South, twists magic through every raindrop, mushroom and stalk of sugarcane, and drops you into the middle of her harrowing, unendurable, magnificent song. This is a gripping, mythic, bone-pulverizing descent into the grim darkness of American slavery – and yet somehow this novel simultaneously leaves you in awe of the human capacity to not only endure, but to ascend back to the light. A spectacular achievement
Anthony Doerr, author of ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE A stunning achievement. Will grip you from the first word to the last
Nathan Harris, author of THE SWEETNESS OF WATER This harrowing, extravagantly beautiful novel at times seems to hover halfway between the real world and the spirit one. A sublime work
Daily Mail
A visceral chronicle of one young woman’s bondage ... This is a sensual book
Economist
A lush and harrowing journey through the American antebellum South ... Beautifully alive and luminous
Irish Times
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