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Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Literary fiction

Sing, Unburied, Sing

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Each year thousands of members vote for our Book of the Year award—congrats to Sing, Unburied, Sing!

by Jesmyn Ward

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Quick take

This lyrical journey across Mississippi traces one family’s encounters with loss, addiction, violence, and connection.

Synopsis

In Jesmyn Ward’s first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi’s past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. Ward is a major American writer, and in Sing, Unburied, Sing she is at the height of her powers.

Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie’s children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.

Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family. Rich with Ward’s distinctive, musical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature.

Free sample

Sing, Unburied, Sing

From chapter one:

I like to think that I know what death is. I like to think that it's something I could look at straight. When Pop tell me he need my help and I see that black knife slid into the belt of his pants, I follow Pop out the house, try to keep my back straight, my shoulders even as a hanger; that's how Pop walks. I try to look like this is normal and boring so Pop will think I've earned these thirteen years, so Pop will know I'm ready to pull what needs to be pulled, separate innards from muscle, organs from cavities. I want Pop to know I can get bloody. Today's my birthday.

I grab the door so it don't slam, ease it into the jamb. I don't want Mam or Kayla to wake up with none of us in the house. Better for them to sleep. Better for my little sister, Kayla, to sleep, because on nights when Leonie's out working, she wake up every hour, sit straight up in the bed, and scream. Better for Grandma Mam to sleep, because the chemo done dried her up and hollowed her out the way the sun and the air do water oaks. Pop weaves in and out of the trees, straight and slim and brown as a young pine tree. He spits in the dry red dirt, and the wind makes the trees wave. It's cold. This spring is stubborn; most days, it won't make way for warmth. The chill stays like water in a bad-draining tub. I left my hoodie on the floor in Leonie's room, where I sleep, and my T-shirt is thin, but I don't rub my arms. If I let the cold goad me, I know when I see the goat, I'll flinch or frown when Pop cuts the throat. And Pop, being Pop, will see.

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Why I love it

Ghost stories come in many different incarnations. There are the campfire tales about things that go bump in the night. There are legends about ghouls bent on revenge and fright night phantoms. And then there are stories about restless spirits who return to the world not to frighten the living but to guide them toward some buried truth.

Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, is that last type of ghost story. Set in the poor, rural South—a place chock full of eerie history, but not the type anyone goes on tours to see—the novel begins with Jojo: a boy not long from becoming a man, forced to grow up too soon. Jojo and his toddler-age sister Kayla live with their grandmother, who is withering away from cancer, and their grandfather, their primary caregiver who is still haunted by his years of unjust incarceration as a boy.

The kids’ mother, Leonie, is a phantom-like presence herself, fading in and out of her family’s life. She is waiting for Michael—the children’s white father—to finish a prison sentence so they can be reunited. Leonie seems less interested in parenting than getting high with her paramour and escaping from a world that won’t accept their love. But drugs also open a door in Leonie’s mind: It’s the only time she can see her dead brother, who was murdered when he was a teenager.

The plot spans only a few days, catalyzed by Michael’s release and the road trip to the prison Leonie takes to pick him up. The kids are forced to come along and to fend for one another in the face of neglect and danger. As the past and the present quite literally begin to meld as more and more ghosts reveal themselves, anxiety brews and builds to a brink that’s nearly unbearable.

Perhaps because Ward resists stereotyping, and because of the empathy that is imbued in the construction of the novel—the perspective shifts, back and forth, like a languid game of ping pong, between Jojo, Leonie, and a ghost from their ancestral past—Sing, Unburied, Sing leaves you with an understanding of the forces that have shaped life for this small family. Ward lifts the veil on their heartaches, which makes it hard to judge them for the cards they’ve been dealt. They are broken and fractured. But the pieces are held together by love and by the figures from the past who haunt them all.

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Literary fiction
View all
Intermezzo
The Book of George
Real Americans
Dirty Diana
Wellness
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
The God of the Woods
Same As It Ever Was
Annie Bot
Bear
Mercury
True Biz
Family Happiness
The Husbands
The Lady Waiting
The Other Valley
Hard by a Great Forest
Good Material
The Bullet Swallower
Happy All the Time
Rental House
Alice Sadie Celine
Let Us Descend
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Shark Heart
Homeseeking
Transcendent Kingdom
Hello Beautiful
Dominicana
What's Mine and Yours
The Unsettled
Ask Again, Yes
Vladimir
Infinite Country
The Prophets
Normal People
The Verifiers
Salvage the Bones
The Many Daughters of Afong Moy
I Have Some Questions for You
Black Buck
The History of Love
Age of Vice
Paper Names
The Light Pirate
The Secret History
The Kite Runner
Memorial
The Half Moon
Happiness Falls
The Gifted School
The Death of Vivek Oji
The Knockout Queen
Little Monsters
Yerba Buena
Beautiful World, Where Are You
Free Food for Millionaires
A Burning
The Mothers
The Water Dancer
Small Country
The Sympathizer
Fleishman Is in Trouble
Lot
An American Marriage
The Animators
The Mars Room
Exit West
White Fur
Woman No. 17
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Eat Only When You're Hungry
Rainbirds
A Ladder to the Sky
Golden Child
The Goldfinch
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P
& Sons
The Association of Small Bombs
Lolly Willowes
All Grown Up
Marlena
Signal Fires
Someday, Maybe
Woman of Light
Marrying the Ketchups
The Shards
Blue Sisters