Loving “Let Us Descend”? Check out Jesmyn Ward’s Other Books

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Jesmyn Ward is a collector of superlatives. She is the first person in her immediate family to go to college, getting both her bachelor’s and her master’s at Stanford. She went on to become the first woman and the first Black author to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice. At age 45, she became the youngest recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. As if that weren’t enough, she is also a MacArthur “Genius.” And she accomplished all that before writing her earth-shattering Oprah’s Book Club pick, Let Us Descend! If you are just falling in love with Ward’s storytelling now, check out her first six books below.

Where the Line Bleeds

In Ward’s first novel, she introduces us to a fictional town based on her own hometown of DeLisle, Mississippi—where she set all her novels prior to Let Us Descend. Taking place over the course of a single summer, Where the Line Bleeds traces twin brothers, Joshua and Christophe, as they struggle to define and support themselves after graduating high school. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the job prospects for young men in the Gulf Coast town are slim; Joshua manages to get work on the docks, but Christophe falls into drug dealing. Raised by their ailing grandmother, the two boys have been inseparable since childhood, but their relationship begins to fray as their estranged parents reenter their lives and they are forced to reckon, individually, with the duties of family, the legacy of addiction, and the meaning of manhood.

Salvage the Bones

In her second novel (and first National Book Award win), Ward trains her gaze directly on Hurricane Katrina, an event she lived through and that she felt “receded from public consciousness” far too quickly. Esch is 14 and pregnant, watching a storm build over the Gulf of Mexico, drawing closer to the coastal Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage, where she lives with her alcoholic father, three brothers, and prized pitbull, China, who is expecting a litter of puppies any minute. It has been seven years since Esch’s own mother died giving birth to her youngest brother, Junior. When the storm hits, the world this family knew—however precarious—will undoubtedly disappear. What will emerge in its place?

Men We Reaped

Ward’s first and only memoir to date borrows its title from Harriet Tubman’s eyewitness account of an all-Black infantry’s brutal defeat in the Civil War: “We heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.” Like Tubman, Ward is bearing witness to the deaths of Black men, chronicling a five-year period during which five men she loved died young and senselessly, including her own brother. With alarming beauty and raw pain, Ward brings these men to life on the page and brings readers into the fold of her own Black Southern community. This is a story both of personal loss and of systemic injustice, as Ward seamlessly links these individual tragedies to the policies, histories, and prejudices that left these men—and the people who loved them—so violently imperiled.

The Fire This Time

Ward edited this anthology of essays and poems in response to James Baldwin’s seminal essay collection The Fire Next Time, and out of outrage at Trayvon Martin’s killing. Bringing together many of the most influential thinkers of our time, including fellow Oprah’s Book Club authors Edwidge Danticat and Isabel Wilkerson, this collection explores the past, present, and future of Black life in America. In addition to providing a forum for vital reckonings, this book is also intended to provide relief; Ward hopes that a little girl could pick up a copy from her local library and find in its pages “a wise aunt, a more present mother, who saw her terror and despair threading their fingers through her hair, and would comfort her. We want to tell her this: You matter. I love you. Please don’t forget it.”

Sing, Unburied, Sing

If you found yourself fascinated by the layered, spiritual world of Let Us Descend, then run, don’t walk to your nearest bookseller (or save yourself the energy and just click on the link above). Ward’s third novel incorporates multiple voices—some living and some dead—to paint a portrait of a mixed-race family contending with their place in American history and in their Southern community. Jojo is 13 years old, struggling to do right by his younger sister and frustrated by his mother’s inability to be the reliable, selfless parent he yearns for. But his mother, Leonie, is bearing more than her son knows; she is haunted by the spirit of her murdered brother, Given, whom she can only see when she uses drugs. There are more spirits clinging to this family than even Leonie knows, and more buried secrets yet to be uncovered.

Navigate Your Stars

This illustrated edition of Ward’s infectiously inspirational address at Tulane’s commencement is perfect to gift not only for recent grads but for anyone in need of support and inspiration. In 2018, Ward took to the stage to offer the graduating class some words of wisdom on an unexpected subject for a renowned author: failure. In the speech, she reveals her own post-graduate floundering and her mistaken belief that education alone would grant her a better life than those who came before her. “My years in college and afterward taught me this: Success is not the result of making one good choice, of taking one step. Real success requires step after step, after step, after step. It requires choice after choice, it demands education and passion and commitment and persistence and hunger and patience.”

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