A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award–winner Jesmyn Ward.<br /><br />In Jesmyn Ward’s first novel since her National Book Award–winning<i>Salvage the Bones</i>, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner,<i>The Odyssey</i>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<i>Sing, Unburied, Sing</i>she is at the height of her powers.<br /><br />Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm 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 across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.<br /><br /><i>Sing, Unburied, Sing</i>grapples with the ugly 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,<i>Sing, Unburied, Sing</i>is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature.