LET US DESCEND
by Jesmyn Ward (Bloomsbury, $36.99)
If William Faulkner and Toni Morrison had a literary love child, it might be Jesmyn Ward.
Born in poverty in the rural Mississippi town of DeLisle (current population 1712), Ward is the only African-American and the only woman to have been awarded the National Book Award twice. Her first was for 2011’sbased on her experience battling the destructive ferocity of Hurricane Katrina. The second was for 2017’s a novel in three voices centred around a road trip to Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Prison, one of them belonging to the ghost of an innocent young man whose violent death was covered up by the jailers’ chilling omerta.
