Sing, Unburied, Sing

"Ghosts, literal and literary, haunt nearly every page of Sing, Unburied, Sing -- a novel whose boundaries between the living and the dead shift constantly, like smoke or sand. Set on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi (a place rich in oil rigs and atmosphere, if almost nothing else), the book's Southern gothic aura recalls the dense, head-spinning prose of William Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor. But the voice is entirely Ward's own, a voluptuous magical realism that takes root in the darkest corners of human behavior ... Ward, whose Salvage the Bones won a National Book Award, has emerged as one of the most searing and singularly gifted writers working today. Grade: A."
--Entertainment Weekly

"However eternal its concerns, Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward's new book, is perfectly poised for the moment. It combines aspects of the American road novel and the ghost story with a timely treatment of the long aftershocks of a hurricane and the opioid epidemic devouring rural America."
--The New York Times

"Staggering ... even more expansive and layered [than Salvage the Bones]. A furious brew with hints of Toni Morrison and Homer's "The Odyssey," Ward's novel hits full stride when Leonie takes her children and a friend and hits the road to pick up her children's father, Michael, from prison. On a real and metaphorical road of secrets and sorrows, the story shifts narrators -- from Jojo to Leonie to Richie, a doomed boy from his grandfather's fractured past -- as they crash into both the ghosts that stalk them, as well as the disquieting ways these characters haunt themselves."
--Boston Globe

"Sing, Unburied, Sing is many things: a road novel, a slender epic of three generations and the ghosts that haunt them, and a portrait of what ordinary folk in dire circumstances cleave to as well as what they -- and perhaps we all -- are trying to outrun."
--New York Times Book Review

"Sing, Unburied Sing is Ward's third novel and her most ambitious yet. Her lyrical prose takes on, alternately, the tones of a road novel and a ghost story ... Sing, which is longlisted for a 2017 National Book Award, establishes Ward as one of the most poetic writers in the conversation about America's unfinished business in the black South."
--The Atlantic

"While the magical element is new in Ward's fiction, her allusiveness, anchored in her interest in the politics of race, has been pointing in this direction all along. It takes a touch of the spiritual to speak across chasms of age, class, and color ... The signal characteristic of Ward's prose is its lyricism. "I'm a failed poet," she has said. The length and music of Ward's sentences owe much to her love of catalogues, extended similes, imagistic fragments, and emphasis by way of repetition ... The effect, intensified by use of the present tense, can be hypnotic. Some chapters sound like fairy tales. This, and her ease with vernacular language, puts Ward in fellowship with such forebears as Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner."
--The New Yorker

"[A] tour de force ... Ward is an attentive and precise writer who dazzles with natural and supernatural observations and lyrical details ... she continues telling stories we need to hear with rare clarity and power."
--O, the Oprah Magazine

"Electric ... a harrowing panorama of the rural South."
--L.A. Review of Books

"Gorgeous ... Always clear-eyed, Ward knows history is a nightmare. But she insists all the same that we might yet awaken and sing."
--Chicago Tribune

"The novel is built around an arduous car trip: A black woman and her two children drive to a prison to pick up their white father. Ward cleverly uses that itinerant structure to move this family across the land while keeping them pressed together, hot and irritated. As soon as they leave the relative safety of their backwoods farm, the snares and temptations of the outside world crowd in, threatening to derail their trip or cast them into some fresh ordeal .... The plight of this one family is now tied to intersecting crimes and failings that stretch over decades. Looking out to the yard, Jojo thinks, 'The branches are full. They are full with ghosts, two or three, all the way up to the top, to the feathered leaves.' Such is the tree of liberty in this haunted nation."
--Washington Post