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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
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'A must' - Margaret Atwood
'A searing, urgent read' - Celeste Ng
'Staggering' - Marlon James
'Disarmingly beautiful' - Spectator
'Blazing with power, grief and tenderness' - Financial Times
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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.
Jesmyn Ward is an important new voice of the American South - one developing, perhaps, into the twenty-first-century's answer to William Faulkner. Fiercely partisan yet unillusioned, she displays an impressive understand of politics and idiom. But perhaps most striking is her sustained and clear-eyed attention to people who, when noticed at all, are more usually consigned to a novel's periphery. Here they take centre stage and are depicted with the kind of piercing clarity born of love
