Overview

Winner of the National Book Award A New York Times Best Book of the 21st Century An Atlantic Great American Novel of the Last 100 Years ""A taut, wily novel, smartly plotted and voluptuously written . . . Jesmyn Ward makes beautiful music, plays deftly with her reader's expectations."" -Parul Sehgal, New York Times The National Book Award-winning novel from the author of Let Us Descend and Men We Reaped-a gritty but tender story of family and poverty in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting. As the twelve days that make up the novel's framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family--motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce--pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.

Full Product Details

9781608196265

Table of Contents

Reviews

""A taut, wily novel, smartly plotted and voluptuously written. It feels fresh and urgent, but it's an ancient, archetypal tale . . . Jesmyn Ward makes beautiful music, plays deftly with her reader's expectations."" --Parul Sehgal, New York Times Book Review ""Ward tells the story with a tense patience, marking day after day; when the storm comes, overturning everything, it feels like a fatal relief. At least the waiting's over. Salvage the Bones expands our understanding of Katrina's devastation, beyond the pictures of choked rooftops in New Orleans and toward the washed-out, feral landscapes elsewhere along the coast."" --New Yorker ""There's something of Faulkner to Ward's grand diction, which rolls between teenspeak . . . and the larger, incantatory rhythms of myth. She's fearless about her passion coming out purple, and for the most part the intensity of her story carries it off."" --The Paris Review ""I've just read [Salvage the Bones], and it'll be a long time before its magic wears off . . . [a] fiercely poetic novel . . . What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico . . . Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy . . . A palpable sense of desire and sorrow animates every page here . . . Salvage the Bones has the aura of a classic about it."" --Ron Charles, the Washington Post ""Strikingly beautiful, taut, relentless and, by its end, indelible . . . Ward stares down the truth . . . It's astonishingly brave."" --Joan Frank, San Francisco Chronicle ""Salvage the Bones is an intense book, with powerful, direct prose that dips into poetic metaphor . . . the story is told with such immediacy and openness . . . That close-knit familial relationship is vivid and compelling, drawn with complexities and detail."" --Los Angeles Times ""The novel's hugeness of heart and fierceness of family grip and hold on like Skeetah's pit bull."""" --Ellen Feldman, O, the Oprah Magazine ""A fresh new voice in American literature, Ward unflinchingly describes a world full of despair but not devoid of hope."" --PW Starred review for Where the Line Bleeds ""Her prodigious talent and fearless portrayal of a world too often overlooked make her novel a powerful choice."" --Essence for Where the Line Bleeds ""A richly textured tale...like the best fiction, it creates its own world."" --Susan Larson, N.O. Times-Picayune for Where the Line Bleeds ""A remarkable first novel...a lyrical, clear-eyed portrait of a rural South and an African-American reality that are rarely depicted."" --Boston Globe for Where the Line Bleeds

2011 National Book Award WinnerNPR Bestseller IndieBound National Indie Bestseller<br> San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of 2011 Kansas City Star Top 100 Books of the Year Atlanta Journal-Constitution Best of the South 2011 Shelf Awareness, Reviewer's Choice, Top 10 of 2011More.com, Hottest Fall Novels Oprah.com, Books to Watch and Book of the Week Huffington Post, The Best Upcoming BooksVogue.com, Fall Blockbuster Fiction The first great novel about Katrina. --Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe [A] searing, understated, and big-hearted novel. -- Salon Salvage the Bones is an intense book, with powerful, direct prose that dips into poetic metaphor . . . We are immersed in Esch's world, a world in which birth and death nestle close, where there is little safety except that which the siblings create for each other. That close-knit familial relationship is vivid and compelling, drawn with complexities and detail. --Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times I've just read [ Salvage the Bones ] and it'll be a long time before its magic wears off...Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretention, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy . . . A palpable sense of desire and sorrow animates every page here . . . Salvage the Bones has the aura of a classic about it. --Ron Charles, Washington Post A timeless tale of a family that regains its humanity in the face of incalculable loss. --Gina Webb, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Jesmyn Ward has claimed her place both as a contemporary witness of life in the rural south and as a descendant of its great originals. --Nicholas Delbanco, author of Sherbrookes and Lastingness: The Art of Old Age The narrator's voice sparks with beauty as it urges the reader through this moving story set in the shadow of Katrina. --Zoe Triska, Huffington Post

The first great novel about Katrina. <i>Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe</i></p> [A] searing, understated, and big-hearted novel. <i>Salon</i></p> <i>Salvage the Bones</i> is an intense book, with powerful, direct prose that dips into poetic metaphor . . . We are immersed in Esch's world, a world in which birth and death nestle close, where there is little safety except that which the siblings create for each other. That close-knit familial relationship is vivid and compelling, drawn with complexities and detail. <i>Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times</i></p> I've just read [<i>Salvage the Bones</i>] and it'll be a long time before its magic wears off...Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretention, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy . . . A palpable sense of desire and sorrow animates every page here . . . <i>Salvage the Bones</i> has the aura of a classic about it. <i>Ron Charles, Washington Post</i></p> A timeless tale of a family that regains its humanity in the face of incalculable loss. <i>Gina Webb, Atlanta Journal-Constitution</i></p> Jesmyn Ward has claimed her place both as a contemporary witness of life in the rural south and as a descendant of its great originals. <i>Nicholas Delbanco, author of Sherbrookes and Lastingness: The Art of Old Age</i></p> The narrator's voice sparks with beauty as it urges the reader through this moving story set in the shadow of Katrina. <i>Zoe Triska, Huffington Post</i></p> Jesmyn Ward has written . . . the first Katrina-drenched fiction I'd press upon readers now. <i>Karen R. Long, Plain Dealer (Cleveland)</i></p> Ward's redolent prose conjures the magic and menace of the southern landscape. <i>Elizabeth Hoover, Dallas Morning News</i></p> The novel's power comes from the dread of the approaching storm and a pair of violent climaxes. The first is a dog fight, an appalling spectacle given emotional depth by Skeetah's love for the pit bull China (their bond is the strongest and most affecting in the book). When the hurricane strikes, Ms. Ward endows it, too, with attributes maternal and savage: Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.' <i>Wall Street Journal</i></p> From its lyrical yet visceral first scene, this novel had me, and I hardly dared to put it down for fear a spell might be broken. But it never was or will be; such are the gifts of this writer. <i>Laura Kasischke, author of In a Perfect World</i></p> Without a false note . . . A superbly realized work of fiction that, while Southern to the bone, transcends its region to become universal. <i>Kirkus Reviews (starred review)</i></p> With her tough, tense and taut tale of one rural family's bitter and bloody fight for survival in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, [Ward] has secured herself a place among such other great Southern writers as Flannery O'Connor, Harper Lee and William Faulkner. Ward's electrifying, exhilarating, edge-of-your-seat second novel, <i>Salvage the Bones</i>, takes us into the naked heart of one Southern family struggling for both survival and identity. With prose both powerful and poetic, Ward has imagined an unforgettable family. <i>CityBeat (Cincinnati)</i></p> Ward uses fearless, toughly lyrical language to convey this family's close-knit tenderness [and] the sheer bloody-minded difficulty of rural African American life . . . It's an eye-opening heartbreaker that ends in hope . . . You owe it to yourself to read this book. <i>Library Journal (starred review)</i></p> Few works of fiction can capture the heart-wrenching emotions attached to a natural disaster, and fewer still can do it in a way that seems palpable and fresh. <i>Salvage the Bones</i>, the latest by rising star Jesmyn Ward, accomplishes this feat, and then some . . . From beginning to end, Jesmyn flirts with perfection in this stunning second novel, and the reader is rewarded for it. <i>Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, VA)</i></p> A pitch-perfect account of struggle and community in the rural South . . . Though the characters in <i>Salvage the Bones</i> face down Hurricane Katrina, the story isn't really about the storm. It's about people facing challenges, and how they band together to overcome adversity. <i>BookPage</i></p> [<i>Salvage the Bones</i>] is uncompromising and frank, showing both beauty and violence, poverty and resilience, in a powerful and poetic voice. <i>Sun Herald (Biloxi, MS)</i></p>

2011 National Book Award WinnerNPR Bestseller IndieBound National Indie Bestseller San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of 2011 Kansas City Star Top 100 Books of the Year Atlanta Journal-Constitution Best of the South 2011 Shelf Awareness, Reviewer's Choice, Top 10 of 2011More.com, Hottest Fall Novels Oprah.com, Books to Watch and Book of the Week Huffington Post, The Best Upcoming BooksVogue.com, Fall Blockbuster Fiction The first great novel about Katrina. --Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe [A] searing, understated, and big-hearted novel. -- Salon Salvage the Bones is an intense book, with powerful, direct prose that dips into poetic metaphor . . . We are immersed in Esch's world, a world in which birth and death nestle close, where there is little safety except that which the siblings create for each other. That close-knit familial relationship is vivid and compelling, drawn with complexities and detail. --Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times I've just read [ Salvage the Bones ] and it'll be a long time before its magic wears off...Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretention, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy . . . A palpable sense of desire and sorrow animates every page here . . . Salvage the Bones has the aura of a classic about it. --Ron Charles, Washington Post A timeless tale of a family that regains its humanity in the face of incalculable loss. --Gina Webb, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Jesmyn Ward has claimed her place both as a contemporary witness of life in the rural south and as a descendant of its great originals. --Nicholas Delbanco, author of Sherbrookes and Lastingness: The Art of Old Age The narrator's voice sparks with beauty as it urges the reader through this moving story set in the shadow of Katrina. --Zoe Triska, Huffington Post

Author Information

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University. She is the author of the novels Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award, and Sing, Unburied, Sing, which won the 2017 National Book Award. She is also the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time and the author of the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. From 2008-2010, Ward had a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. She was the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi for the 2010-2011 academic year. In 2016, the American Academy of Arts and Letters selected Ward for the Strauss Living Award. She lives in Mississippi.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available