Two-time National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward (Men We Reaped; The Fire This Time) delivers a beautifully written and heartrending historical narrative with her fourth novel, Let Us Descend. On a rice plantation in the Carolinas, an enslaved teenager named Annis narrates as she works alongside her beloved mother. Annis's father is the plantation owner who owns her and her mother. When Annis's father chooses to sell her mother south, Annis falls into a near-fatal grief at being left without the most important person in her life, until a kind friend pulls her back to the surface. But soon, Annis and Safi, her friend-turned-lover, are sent on the same walk, a death march to a New Orleans slave market.
Annis's story deals primarily with grief, forces of nature and human evil, villains and allies. As much pain, struggle, torture as there is in these pages, there are also various forms of love, and great strength, power, and personal reclamation. An Oprah Book Club and Indie Next pick, Let Us Descend ends with surprising hope. --Julia Kastner