Sing, Unburied, Sing: SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018 - Hardcover

Ward, Jesmyn

4.01

135,092 ratings by Goodreads

9781408891049: Sing, Unburied, Sing: SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1408891042 ISBN 13: 9781408891049

Publisher: Bloomsbury Circus, 2017

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2017
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2017
SELECTED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW STATESMAN, THE FINANCIAL TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, TIME AND THE BBC
Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Finalist for the Kirkus Prize
Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

'This wrenching new novel by Jesmyn Ward digs deep into the not-buried heart of the American nightmare. A must' Margaret Atwood

'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

An intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle, Sing, Unburied, Sing examines the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power - and limitations - of family bonds.

Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. His mother, Leonie, is in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is black and her children's father is white. Embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances, she wants to be a better mother, but can't put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use.

When the children's father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love.

Rich with Ward's distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first century America. It is a majestic new work from an extraordinary and singular author.

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Review:

This wrenching new novel by Jesmyn Ward digs deep into the not-buried heart of the American nightmare. A must (Margaret Atwood Twitter)

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)

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 (Melissa Katsoulis The 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)

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)

Combines aspects of the American road novel and the ghost story with an exploration of the long aftershocks of a hurricane (Notable Books of the Year New York Times Book Review)

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, for her and for others like her in the future (Financial Times)

This is also a disarmingly beautiful book - beautiful in every sense: in Ward's full, complex characters, and in her prose, that can transform the ugliest moments ... Ward has achieved something extraordinary with Sing, Unburied, Sing. The voices, relationships and histories of her characters feel wholly true; and like the ghosts that occupy the book's pages, they come to haunt us. Long after the end, we continue to worry after them, love them in spite of their faults, and feel their pain (Spectator)

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)

A novel as blazingly hymn-like as the title suggests (Jon McGregor New Statesman 'Books of the Year')

Book Description:

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2017
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2017
SELECTED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW STATESMAN, THE FINANCIAL TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, TIME AND THE BBC

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