Bloomsbury scoops a 'reimagining of American slavery' from two-time National Book Award winner Ward

Bloomsbury has scooped Let Us Descend, a "reimagining of American slavery" from two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, to be published on 3rd October. 

Alexis Kirschbaum, head of Bloomsbury Trade, acquired UK & Commonwealth (excluding Canada) rights to a new novel by the author of Sing, Unburied, Sing (Bloomsbury), which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Rights were bought from Kathryn Belden at Scribner, US.

The synopsis reads: "Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. "Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother."

Kirschbaum said: "In Let Us Descend Jesmyn Ward’s lyricism is on full display. The novel’s journey toward renewal and rebirth through grief and loss makes this her best and most powerful book to date. I could not be more proud to publish it and help to establish her further as a major American novelist in the UK."

Ward got her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, the Strauss Living Prize, and the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She is the first woman and first Black American winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury).

She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds (Bloomsbury/ Scribner/ Agate Bolden) and the memoir Men We Reaped (Bloomsbury), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University.