From Jesmyn Ward – the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow – comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War

* AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * ‘A spectacular achievement’ ANTHONY DOERR ‘Extravagantly beautiful’ DAILY MAIL ‘One of the greatest writers of all time’ JACQUELINE WOODSON ‘Extraordinary’ GUARDIAN ‘The best book I’ve read in years’ LOUISE KENNEDY ----------------------- The first weapon I ever held was my mother's hand. On a slave plantation in the Carolinas, Annis has survived in the light of her mother’s resilience, comforted by stories of her African warrior grandmother. Everything she knows, she learned from her mother – how to fight, how to be strong, how to grow up in a world shrouded in darkness. When she is sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, Annis must venture onward through the rich but unforgiving landscapes of the American South alone: from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans, and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Searching for relief in memories of her mother, she opens herself to a world beyond her own, teeming with spirits of earth, water, history and myth. A reimagining of American slavery as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching, Let Us Descend offers a magnificent portrait of the strength of the human spirit and its ability to emerge from darkness into light. This is a story of beauty, love, rebirth and reclamation – a masterwork for the ages. Praise for Sing, Unburied, Sing ‘A must’ Margaret Atwood ‘One of the most important writers in America today’ Ann Patchett ‘Ward is a lyrical, visceral storyteller’ Daily Mail ‘A searing, urgent read’ Celeste Ng ‘Plays out like a grand epic … Staggering’ Marlon James

"An extraordinary novel ... As in all of Ward’s novels, the writing is both lyrical and sharply controlled" - Guardian

"A poetic book about slavery … Ward’s writing is like a spirit that flits and flies ... While also going deep into the rich inner world that sustains [Annis]" - Financial Times, Critic's Pick: Best Books of 2023

"This harrowing, extravagantly beautiful novel at times seems to hover halfway between the real world and the spirit one. A sublime work" - Daily Mail

"Elegiac ... Let Us Descend is recounted with a lyrical economy" - Times Literary Supplement

"Ward’s specificity about the horrors of that journey – the beatings, the rapes, the near drownings, the actual drownings – is brutal. But there is also beauty: she has a poet’s ear and her repetition of phrases and conjunctions is hypnotic ... Just as Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead used black spiritual traditions in their writing, so does Ward ... This skein of hope is what keeps one reading’" - Spectator

"This harrowing, extravagantly beautiful novel at times seems to hover halfway between the real world and the spirit one. A sublime work" - Daily Mail

"A visceral chronicle of one young woman’s bondage ... This is a sensual book" - Economist

"A lush and harrowing journey through the American antebellum South ... Beautifully alive and luminous" - Irish Times