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'A brutal, moving memoir … Anyone who emerges from America's black working-class youth with words as fine as Ward's deserves a hearing' - Guardian

 

'Raw, beautiful and dangerous' - New York Times Book Review

 

'Lavishly endowed with literary craft and hard-earned wisdom' - Time

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The beautiful, haunting memoir from Jesmyn Ward, the first woman to win the National Book Award twice

 

'And then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped' - Harriet Tubman

 

Jesmyn Ward's acclaimed memoir shines a light on the community she comes from in the small town of DeLisle, Mississippi, a place of quiet beauty and fierce attachment. Here, in the space of four years, she lost five young black men dear to her, including her beloved brother – to accidents, murder and suicide.

 

Their deaths were seemingly unconnected, yet their lives had been connected by identity and place. As Jesmyn dealt with these losses, she came to a staggering truth: the fates of these young men were predetermined by who they were and where they were from, because racism and economic struggle breed a certain kind of bad luck.

 

The agonising reality brought Jesmyn to write, at last, their true stories and her own.

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'Acute and often beautiful' - Financial Times

'Haunting' - Laurie Penny, New Statesman Books of the Year

'Elegiac, rage-filled, and uncommonly brave' - Vogue

'A brilliant book about beauty and death' - Los Angeles Times

'Essential' - San Francisco Chronicle

'Burns with brilliance' - Harper's Bazaar

'Unvarnished and penetrating' - Elle