Overview

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 BOOKER PRIZE ‘Dazzling’ GUARDIAN ‘Blistering’ THE TIMES 'A delight' DIANA EVANS ‘Fiction written at the highest level’ ANN PATCHETT 'Hilarious, revelatory' MARLON JAMES An electrifying, hilarious and deeply moving tragicomic debut novel following a Jamaican family grappling with a new life in the US. ‘What are you?’ This is the puzzled question that greets a young Trelawny growing up in a Miami where his racial ambiguity is regarded with confusion and suspicion. It’s not just his neighbours, his Jamaican parents Topper and Sanya don’t seem to understand him either. Then there’s his stubborn older brother Delano, who is determined to secure a better future for his own children, no matter what it takes. As both brothers navigate the challenges littered in their path – a woefully unreliable father, racism, recession and even a hurricane – they find themselves increasingly at odds. Will they make it through together or must one brother’s future come at the cost of the other? Shortlisted for the 2024 Gordon Burn Prize ‘An astonishingly assured debut novel … clarity, variety and fizzing prose’ BOOKER PRIZE JUDGES ‘So damn funny’ RUMAAN ALAM ‘Astonishing’ I NEWSPAPER 'Utterly unstoppable’ IRISH TIMES What readers say: ‘So good it was hard to put down’ ‘Humour, real feeling … totally recommend’ ‘So engrossing and entertaining’ ‘A must read’

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9780008501211

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Reviews

'Kaleidoscopic, urgent, hilarious, revelatory and like nothing you've read before. These are the stories that we never believed could be told, until Jonathan Escoffery told them' Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings 'A collection of connected short stories that reads like a novel, that reads like real life, that reads like fiction written at the highest level. This is a compelling hurricane of a book that sweeps the past, present and future together into one inextricable knot. This is where Jonathan Escoffrey's career begins. There are no limits to where he will go' Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House 'An electrifying, enthralling debut about identity and belonging. Jonathan Escoffery illuminates both beauty and trauma and the ways in which so many of us Jamaicans are still looking for home within ourselves. Told with humor and clear-eyed grace, this spectacular collection introduces us to an amazing new voice' Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Here Comes the Sun 'It's truly a feat that a book of short stories tackling such big stuff-family, love, violence, race-could be so damn funny. Jonathan Escoffery is a writer only just getting started, and his first book is a welcome reminder of what fiction can do' Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind 'If I Survive You is a collection of brilliant wit, real heart and electric humour. Jonathan Escoffery masterfully mines from his life and emerges, in this debut, as a talent not to be ignored.' Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black 'These are superb stories about identity, family and place. There is a beautiful economy in the telling that never sacrifices the depth, complexity and richness of the worlds these characters inhabit. Escoffery's is a strong, much needed new voice in our literature' Percival Everett author of Erasure

'If I Survive You is a collection of brilliant wit, real heart and electric humour. Jonathan Escoffery masterfully mines from his life and emerges, in this debut, as a talent not to be ignored.' Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black 'Each story in If I Survive You passes a baton to the next, though it's not for speed but for deepening. As Jonathan Escoffery's debut progresses, the characters layer, stories overlap, voices gather and the result is a moving and layered portrait of a family, at once wise and unflinching.' Aimee Bender author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Wlilful Creatures and The Colour Master: Stories 'Jonathan Escoffery's brilliant first book has some new things to tell us about racial identities, loneliness, and the search for love. It is so sharp-eyed and detailed that you feel that you are living through its scenes. The book is father-haunted and often very funny, and its prose is electric with intelligence. Somehow If I Survive You manages to be scary, humorous, and heartbreaking all at once. I loved this book.' Charles Baxter author of The Feast of Love, First Light, Saul and Patsy and The Soul Thief 'These are superb stories about identity, family and place. There is a beautiful economy in the telling that never sacrifices the depth, complexity and richness of the worlds these characters inhabit. Escoffery's is a strong, much needed new voice in our literature.' Percival Everett author of Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Damned If I Do and So Much Blue

Author Information

Jonathan Escoffery is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature and elsewhere. He is a PhD fellow at the University of Southern California and in 2021 was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. If I Survive You is his first book and was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023 and the National Book Award for Fiction in 2022.

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