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Sing, Unburied, Sing
367 pages
A haunting, lyrical road trip through the ghosts of the American South, where the past bleeds heavily into the present.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like breathing in the thick, humid air of a Mississippi summer—oppressive, heavy with history, yet undeniably alive. The narrative moves at a steady, deliberate pace, anchored by prose that is both brutally grounded in the realities of poverty and addiction, and soaringly poetic in its mythic, ghostly dimensions. You are pulled into a deeply claustrophobic but tender space, riding in the backseat of a car where the ghosts of the past are as real as the living passengers. It is a sorrowful, unflinching experience, yet threaded with a fierce, enduring love. This book will captivate readers who crave lush, atmospheric literary fiction that confronts intergenerational trauma and the inescapable weight of American history with profound empathy and lyrical grace.
- Mood
- haunting
- humid
- oppressive
- sorrowful
- tender
- Tone
- elegiac
- unflinching
- lyrical
- empathetic
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- intergenerational trauma · the weight of history · maternal ambivalence · systemic racism · ghosts of the past
- The writing
- Lyrical, rhythmic, and deeply sensory, blending gritty realism with poetic, mythic resonance.
- The arc
- Moves from a tense, fractured reality through a harrowing, ghost-haunted journey toward a fragile, hard-won moment of grace.
- Who it's for
- Readers who appreciate lush, atmospheric literary fiction that tackles heavy, systemic issues through intimate, supernatural-tinged family dramas.
Content notes
- drug addiction
- child neglect
- racism
- police violence
- terminal illness
- incarceration
About the book
A SEARING AND PROFOUND SOUTHERN ODYSSEY BY NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER JESMYN WARD
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, multiply awarded and universally lauded, 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 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 for Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.
Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the 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.
This description comes from the 2017 Scribner edition.
Description from Open Library.
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