If I Survive You

Written by Jonathan Escoffery

Narrated by Torian Brackett

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 BOOKER PRIZE

‘Dazzling’ GUARDIAN

‘Blistering’ THE TIMES

'A delight' DIANA EVANS

‘Fiction written at the highest level’ ANN PATCHETT

'Hilarious, revelatory' MARLON JAMES

An electrifying, hilarious and deeply moving tragicomic debut novel following a Jamaican family grappling with a new life in the US.

‘What are you?’

This is the puzzled question that greets a young Trelawny growing up in a Miami where his racial ambiguity is regarded with confusion and suspicion. It’s not just his neighbours, his Jamaican parents Topper and Sanya don’t seem to understand him either. Then there’s his stubborn older brother Delano, who is determined to secure a better future for his own children, no matter what it takes.

As both brothers navigate the challenges littered in their path – a woefully unreliable father, racism, recession and even a hurricane – they find themselves increasingly at odds. Will they make it through together or must one brother’s future come at the cost of the other?

Shortlisted for the 2024 Gordon Burn Prize

‘An astonishingly assured debut novel … clarity, variety and fizzing prose’ BOOKER PRIZE JUDGES

‘So damn funny’ RUMAAN ALAM

‘Astonishing’ I NEWSPAPER

'Utterly unstoppable’ IRISH TIMES

What readers say:

‘So good it was hard to put down’

‘Humour, real feeling … totally recommend’

‘So engrossing and entertaining’

‘A must read’

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Release date: Feb 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9780008501235

Jonathan Escoffery

Jonathan Escoffery is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Passages North, Zyzzyva, and Electric Literature, and has been anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing. He is a fellow in the University of Southern California’s PhD in Creative Writing and Literature Program, and in 2021 he was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. He was raised in Miami, Florida. If I Survive You is his first book.

Reviews for If I Survive You

[sparemethecensor · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

DNF. The chapters were not connected enough to make a real novel. Only recommended for fans of short stories.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the story of a Jamaican American family, primarily told through the experiences of Trelawney, the youngest son. Spanning decades, beginning with Hurricane Andrew, blasting through their family home and through the family's stability, through Trelawney's struggles to make his way in a world not eager to allow a Black man to succeed. This is a novel about toxic family dynamics and a lonely boy who couldn't figure out where he belongs. I'm not sure this novel entirely succeeds; the effort being put into its writing sometimes shows, but Escoffery has a unique voice and a real talent and his writing career will be one to watch.

[narshkite · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fresh and vital, totally absorbing, I really enjoyed this read. The book is a collection of connected short stories about a Jamaican family in Miami. Most of the stories are from the perspective of Trelawney, one of the family's two sons, but we also get stories from his brother Delano and his father and a cousin, Cukie. Trelawney is the only US born family member, and the difference does not end at place of birth. Trelawney, unlike Delano, is an American, he goes to high school, attends college in the Midwest (where he learns he is Black, among other things), and gets nothing but degradation from trying to live his life by those rules. His father rejects him utterly. His mother decides she is done serving men and sells his childhood home and heads back to Kingston (and then after realizing she has been in America too long and Kingston is no longer home moves to Florence.) He finds himself homeless, and then answerable to his self-serving father and brother for survival. To top things off he finds he has no tribe as a visually ethnically ambiguous English degree wielding underemployed 20-something in Miami or in his college time in the Midwest. This book is funny and heartbreaking, wise and wicked, and tells a unique story very very well.I wish Escoffery had written this as a novel rather than as short stories. I did not need the other POVs. Trelawney is captivating, and his are the strongest stories by far. The Cukie story particularly was weirdly wedged in and would have been better as a freestanding short story. The changes in narrative kicked my butt out of the story, and it was a story I really wanted to stay in. So much of this was a 5-star, but it is a a high 4 even with the missteps. I cannot wait to see what he does next.

[bookwyrmm_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Escoffery has a unique voice that really draws the reader in, even as he plays with styles among these connected short stories.

[castlelass · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Born in America, Trelawny is the son of Jamaican immigrant parents. His older brother, Delano, is his father’s favorite. Trelawny starts out at age nine, in 1992, in South Miami. His family’s home is destroyed in Hurricane Andrew. When his parent divorce, Trelawny lives with his mother and Delano stays with his father. Trelawny is a bookish kid. He gets a scholarship to a northern midwestern college, but he graduates at the apex of the recession of 2008 and there are no jobs to be found. The narrative follows his life over the course of two decades.This book packs an emotional punch. It focuses on the Jamaican American experience, and the depiction of race in America is spot on. The American tendency to “define” someone by a single term is parodied to humorous (but sad) effect. Trelawny’s mixed ethnicities lead him to be variously labeled as Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, and black. He tries to fit in but still feels like an outsider. It is told in a series of short stories, which easily flow together to form a novel. The first story in the book is one of the best I have read. Another set of striking stories is that of Trelawny’s cousin, Cukie, meeting his father for the first time and finding out exactly what kind of man abandons his child. This book covers a lot of ground – dysfunctional families, father-son dynamics, abandonment, race, class, financial struggles, underemployment, and identity. I am impressed by this author, especially considering this book is his debut. I listened to the audio book, which is brilliantly narrated by Torian Brackett. I feel like audio is the way to go. It definitely helped with the single chapter told in Jamaican patois by Trelawny’s father. I will keep an eye out for future works by Jonathan Escoffery. 4.5

[richardderus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Publisher Says: A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family striving for more in Miami, and introduces a generational storyteller.In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what their younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.”Masterfully constructed with heart and humor, the linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You center on Trelawny as he struggles to carve out a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism, and flat-out bad luck. After a fight with Topper—himself reckoning with his failures as a parent and his longing for Jamaica—Trelawny claws his way out of homelessness through a series of odd, often hilarious jobs. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab to get his kids back, and his cousin, Cukie, looks for a father who doesn’t want to be found. As each character searches for a foothold, they never forget the profound danger of climbing without a safety net.Pulsing with vibrant lyricism and inimitable style, sly commentary and contagious laughter, Escoffery’s debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and whiteness. With If I Survive You, Escoffery announces himself as a prodigious storyteller in a class of his own, a chronicler of American life at its most gruesome and hopeful.I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.My Review: When I think about braided-stories novels, there's always a little frisson of fear in my response. I don't always think it's the best idea to try to make a novel out of things that don't fit together naturally. If there's an organic flow among stories, what stops the author from making it into a regular novel-style novel? Why this technique, not another that doesn't make The Market shudder deep in its bones? All we ever hear is that stories are hard to sell, collections are death in the stores, writing stories is just as hard as writing novels but even less remunerative. I'm inured to this cant of can't by now. It's done its damage. I look askance at connected collections.What, then, is the reason I decided to read this iteration of the story-novel? There's no one thing, there's a constellation of tweaks and trips. I find the idea of books others can't "understand" tempting. I am all for creative uses of the many kinds of English out there waiting to make my acquaintance. I'll walk a mile for a good story about people who just...can't...because they're my people. Because whatever else divides us, we have one thing in common: We don't Belong, and others do. That's worth a lot of effort...which, for the record, I did not think was needed in reading this book. The second story is in patwa but the rest? Not a bit of it.It pleases me to use my time-honored technique called the Bryce Method to explicate the wonders herein to feast upon at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud.