A palpable sense of desire and sorrow animates every page here. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. 'I’ve just read, and it’ll be a long time before its magic wears off. She's fearless about her passion coming out purple, and for the most part the intensity of her story carries it off.' - The Paris Review and the larger, incantatory rhythms of myth. 'There's something of Faulkner to Ward's grand diction, which rolls between teenspeak. Salvage the Bones expands our understanding of Katrina’s devastation, beyond the pictures of choked rooftops in New Orleans and toward the washed-out, feral landscapes elsewhere along the coast.' - New Yorker 'Ward tells the story with a tense patience, marking day after day when the storm comes, overturning everything, it feels like a fatal relief. Jesmyn Ward makes beautiful music, plays deftly with her reader’s expectations.' - Parul Sehgal, New York Times Book Review It feels fresh and urgent, but it’s an ancient, archetypal tale. 'A taut, wily novel, smartly plotted and voluptuously written.

A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting.Īs the twelve days that make up the novel's framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family-motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce-pulls itself up to face another day. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets she's fourteen and pregnant. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Jesmyn Ward, two-time National Book Award winner and author of Sing, Unburied, Sing, delivers a gritty but tender novel about family and poverty in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina.Ī hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned.

Author of salvage the bones