Let Us Descend: An Oprah's Book Club Pick

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Let us descend, and enter his blind world Dantes Inferno Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the readers guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation. From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Wards most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages.

Reviews

I have read all of Jesmyn Wards books and have been a fan of her writing for years. Let Us Descend is a vital work for our culture and Im so excited to have her newest offering as part of our Book Club -- Oprah Winfrey
An extraordinary novel ... As in all of Wards novels, the writing is both lyrical and sharply controlled * Guardian *
This harrowing, extravagantly beautiful novel at times seems to hover halfway between the real world and the spirit one. A sublime work * Daily Mail *
Elegiac ... Let Us Descend is recounted with a lyrical economy * Times Literary Supplement *
Wards specificity about the horrors of that journey the beatings, the rapes, the near drownings, the actual drownings is brutal. But there is also beauty: she has a poets ear and her repetition of phrases and conjunctions is hypnotic ... Just as Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead used black spiritual traditions in their writing, so does Ward ... This skein of hope is what keeps one reading * Spectator *
Jesmyn Ward is one of the greatest writers of all time. And Let Us Descend, once again, proves it -- Jacqueline Woodson, author of RED AT THE BONE
Exquisite, harrowing, elemental, transcendent and ultimately hopeful. The best book Ive read in years. What a writer Jesmyn Ward is! -- Louise Kennedy, author of TRESPASSES
Ward resurrects an enslaved girl out of the lost folds of the antebellum South, twists magic through every raindrop, mushroom and stalk of sugarcane, 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 ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE
A stunning achievement. Will grip you from the first word to the last -- Nathan Harris, author of THE SWEETNESS OF WATER
This harrowing, extravagantly beautiful novel at times seems to hover halfway between the real world and the spirit one. A sublime work * Daily Mail *

Author Bio

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She was shortlisted for the Womens Prize for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing, and is the winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction for both Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones. She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds 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.