Salvage the Bones: A Novel - Softcover

Ward, Jesmyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1608196267 ISBN 13: 9781608196265

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2012

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received a MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renée Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She is the winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones (2011). She is also the author of Where the Line Bleeds; Let Us Descend, an Oprah Book Club pick and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize; and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1608196267
• ISBN 13: 9781608196265
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288