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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,' the poet now began, 'and enter this blind world.'" —Inferno, Dante Alighieri"By default, slavery offers its horrors as a tension. Annis's overwhelming grief as she loses people close to her is also a relatively expected narrative layer. Mama Aza's mystical, sometimes sinister presence is a fascinating, unexpected tension that complements Annis's experiences very well. But these tensions are not the only moving pieces of the plot as it unfolds: Ward's novel is also a coming-of-age story. Alongside the bleak reality of her life, readers grow up with Annis, hearing her interests and her desire for freedom, seeing how what freedom means to her evolves." - BookBrowse
"A new novel from Jesmyn Ward is always a reason for celebration… In this magical realist masterwork, Ward writes with lyric brilliance about women's resilience in the face of heartbreaking odds." - Esquire
"A devastating, deeply moving masterpiece." - Good Housekeeping
"An articulation of grief and sadness unlike anything I've ever read…While Ward never flinches from the horrors of slavery or the deep scars it has left on America's political and social landscape, it's Annis's unwillingness to succumb to grief and loss that makes Let Us Descend such a powerful novel." - Locus Magazine
"[Ward's] most masterful work yet... Pitting ancestral wisdom and human connection against the arbitrary brutality of slavery, this book will have readers torn between wanting to savor the richness of every sentence and needing to know, immediately, what happens next." - Oprah Daily
"Annis's story, told in Ward's musical prose, is nothing short of epic, magical, and intensely moving." - Vogue
"Two-time National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward (the first woman and the first Black American to achieve that feat) follows her fierce and tender novel Sing, Unburied, Sing with a historical narrative about survival, iron will and spiritual rebirth. Taking its title from Dante's Inferno, the story follows Annis through the hell of enslavement and the saving grace of ancestral memories." - LA Times
"Annis is strengthened by stories of her warrior ancestors as she struggles to retain her sense of self through the pain and terror of her journey." - St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Ward's writing is breathtaking in its brutal honesty of life among slavers and is also lyrical in the moments of imaginative escape." - The Denver Harold
"Imaginative... Combining magical realism with historical fiction, two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward's fourth novel tells the story of Annis, an enslaved girl in the antebellum South... To survive, she must tap into the mystical in this heart-wrenching narrative of the American South in the age of slavery." - Time
"This harrowing, haunting story about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War is inspired in part by Dante's Inferno and the descent into the underworld... Ward, the youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, among many other distinctions, turns her brilliant gaze to the grief and joy of the Black American experience." - W Magazine
"The power and artistry of Ward's work has been celebrated with numerous major awards, and her new novel will be a magnet for readers." - Booklist (starred review)
"[An] intensely wrought tone poem...[W]hat gives this volume its stature and heft among other recent novels are the power, precision, and visionary flow of Ward's writing, the way she makes the unimaginable horror, soul-crushing drudgery, and haphazard cruelties of the distant past vivid to her readers...Ward may not tell you anything new about slavery, but her language is saturated with terror and enchantment." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[Ward] employs her prodigious skills to craft a deeply moving and empathic story... This testament to Ward's mastery of language should leave readers scrambling for a highlighter." - Library Journal (starred review)
"[A] wrenching and beautifully told story...Throughout, Ward uses stark and striking language to describe Annis's pain...Readers won't be able to turn away." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In Let Us Descend, Jesmyn Ward resurrects an enslaved girl out of the lost folds of the antebellum South, twists magic through every raindrop, mushroom, and stalk of sugar cane, 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 Cloud Cuckoo Land and All The Light We Cannot See
"Jesmyn is, quite simply, the best of us." - Ta-Nehisi Coates
About The SweepstakesYour guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
