Literary Fiction · TenseA Mississippi family prepares for Hurricane Katrina while a pit bull has puppies and a girl learns she is pregnant
Salvage the Bones
by Jesmyn Ward
A Mississippi family prepares for Hurricane Katrina and then faces it
Esch lives in a town in southern Mississippi with her widowed father, Claude, and her brothers Randall, Skeetah and Junior. Skeetah's pit bull, China, gives birth to puppies at the start of the novel. Esch learns that she is pregnant by Manny, who is seeing another girl. Skeetah and Manny clash and agree to settle it with a dogfight, and then Hurricane Katrina arrives in 2005.
More about this book
Who
Esch, who narrates, her father Claude, her brothers Randall, Skeetah and Junior, Skeetah's pit bull China, and Manny.
World
Southern Mississippi in 2005, as Hurricane Katrina approaches and strikes.
What makes it different
Ward lived through Katrina and wrote the novel because she was dissatisfied that the storm was fading from public attention. She has named Euripides' Medea and the work of William Faulkner as influences.
Feel
Tense and poetic. It won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction.
Page count and cover shown for: Selected edition
Behind the book
Ward lived through Hurricane Katrina and wrote the book because she felt the storm was fading from public attention. In a Paris Review interview she said she drew on Euripides' Medea and on William Faulkner.
Source: Wikipedia
Further reading
- Salvage the BonesWikipedia