Sing, Unburied, Sing

Ward’s second National Book Award winner is a more ambitious and structurally complex novel than “Salvage the Bones.” It follows thirteen-year-old Jojo and his drug-addicted mother Leonie on a road trip across Mississippi to pick up Jojo’s white father from Parchman Farm, the state penitentiary. Along the way, ghosts appear. The past bleeds into the present. And the brutal history of the Mississippi prison system becomes inseparable from this family’s story.

Why This One

If “Salvage the Bones” shows what Ward can do with a tight, concentrated structure, “Sing, Unburied, Sing” shows what happens when she opens up the frame. The novel has three narrators: Jojo, Leonie, and a ghost named Richie who died at Parchman decades earlier. Each voice is distinct and fully realized.

Ward uses the ghost story not as a genre exercise but as a way to make visible the trauma that gets passed down through generations. Richie’s story, a Black boy imprisoned at thirteen and killed by the system, is not separate from Jojo’s present. It is the same story, playing out in different forms. The novel draws on Faulkner, Morrison, and Homer without ever feeling derivative.

What to Expect

A road trip novel with supernatural elements and multiple narrators. The prose is lyrical, the structure more demanding than “Salvage the Bones.” Ward alternates between Jojo’s grounded, sensory narration and Leonie’s fractured, guilt-ridden perspective. The ghost sequences are haunting rather than frightening. At 289 pages, it is a quick read in terms of length, but the emotional weight requires some processing time.