Salvage the Bones

A raw, lyrical novel about a poor Black family in rural Mississippi bracing for Hurricane Katrina. Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award for this book, and it represents a contemporary extension of the Southern Gothic tradition: the same decaying landscape, the same unflinching look at poverty and race, but told from a perspective the genre’s founders rarely centered.

Why This One

Southern Gothic has historically been written from white perspectives. Ward changes that. Her narrator is fifteen-year-old Esch Batiste, pregnant and living in a Mississippi bayou community called Bois Sauvage with her three brothers and their alcoholic, grieving father. Over twelve days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, the family scavenges, fights, tends to a prized pit bull’s new litter, and holds together through sheer stubbornness and love.

Ward’s prose is dense and muscular, full of mythological allusions. Esch reads the story of Medea and sees her own life reflected back. The hurricane, when it arrives, is both a literal catastrophe and a reckoning with everything the family has been trying to outrun. The novel makes you feel the heat, the mud, the hunger, and the fierce attachment these siblings have to each other.

What to Expect

A short, intense novel told in present tense over twelve days. The language is poetic and sometimes challenging, but the story moves quickly. Ward does not sentimentalize poverty or suffering. She shows you a family that is broke and struggling and also deeply alive. The hurricane sequence is one of the most visceral passages in recent American fiction. At 258 pages, it can be read in a couple of sittings.