Overview

* 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 ----------------------- 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 world 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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9781526666710

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Reviews

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

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

Author Information

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 National 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.

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