From Jesmyn Ward--the two-time National Book AWard winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow--comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War.
Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward\'s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages..
From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land--the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South.
While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.
Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take.
As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother.
Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader\'s guide through this hellscape.
Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. \'Let us descend, \' the poet now began, \'and enter this blind world.\' -- Inferno , Dante Alighieri Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching.
From Jesmyn Ward--the two-time National Book AWard winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow--comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War
