About Salvage the Bones
Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (September 8, 2011)
A stunning new voice from the Gulf Coast delivers a gritty but tender novel about family and poverty in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina.
A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch’s father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn’t show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn’t much to save. Lately, Esch can’t keep down what food she gets; she’s fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull’s new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child’s play and short on parenting.
As the twelve days that make up the novel’s framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family-motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce-pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.
About Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward is a former Stegner fellow at Stanford and Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Her novels, Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, are both set on the Mississippi coast where she grew up. Bloomsbury will publish her memoir about an epidemic of deaths of young black men in her community. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Alabama.
Jesmyn Ward’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:
Monday, September 5th: A Bookish Way of Life
Tuesday, September 6th: So Many Precious Books, So Little Time
Wednesday, September 7th: Raging Bibliomania
Monday, September 12th: Wandering Thoughts of a Scientific Housewife
Wednesday, September 14th: Caribousmom
Monday, September 19th: Book Addiction
Wednesday, September 21st: The Scarlet Letter
Monday, September 26th: Well Read Wife
Tuesday, September 27th: Unabridged Chick
Thursday, September 29th: Peeking Between the Pages
Tuesday, October 18th: So Many Precious Books, So Little Time – author guest post
Monday, October 24th: Linus’s Blanket – Out of Twenty Q&A