Salvage the Bones
A National Book Award-winning novel set in the twelve days before Hurricane Katrina hits a poor Black family in rural Mississippi -- fierce, lyrical, and unforgettable.
Esch is fifteen, pregnant, and living in Bois Sauvage, a fictional town in coastal Mississippi modeled on Ward’s own DeLisle. The novel unfolds across twelve days in August 2005, as the Batiste family – her father and three brothers – senses that the approaching storm might be the one that ends everything.
Ward writes about the Gulf Coast with the intimacy of someone who grew up there and stayed. The landscape is specific: the pine woods, the red clay, the drainage ditches, the way the air feels before a major storm. The community she portrays – poor, Black, rural, largely invisible to the rest of the country – is rendered with complete dignity and specificity.
For Loopers transiting the Mississippi Gulf Coast, this book provides something that navigation charts never can: a sense of who lives on that shore and what it costs them to stay. The stretch from Mobile Bay to the mouth of the Mississippi can feel like miles of low development and a quick passage point. Ward makes it a place with deep roots and real stakes.
Won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction. Ward has since become one of the most celebrated American novelists working today.
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