Salvage the Bones cover

Salvage the Bones

by Jesmyn Ward

A Mississippi family. A storm coming. Twelve days.

For you if

you want to understand the Gulf Coast poor through someone who was there before the storm made it a news story

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Twelve days in the Mississippi Delta before Hurricane Katrina. Esch is fifteen, pregnant, living with her father and three brothers in deep poverty, the storm coming. Ward writes in a prose so precise about the texture of this specific life — the dog fights, the egg-gathering, the pit bull about to give birth — that the catastrophe, when it arrives, lands on something you know and love. The most important American novelist alive and the most overlooked. A dispatch about what Katrina revealed about what America thinks Black Southern poverty is worth.

Where This Book Lives

Setting
North America
Voice
Written by a North America author