One of the most important writers in America today
- Ann Patchett,
A writer of such lyric imagination
New York Times Book Review
The voices, relationships and histories of [Ward's] characters feel wholly true ... Long after the end, we continue to worry after them, love them in spite of their faults, and feel their pain
Spectator
The heir to Faulkner
Time
A lyrical yet clear-eyed portrait of a rural South and an African-American reality that are rarely depicted
Boston Globe
An important new voice of the American South – one developing, perhaps, into the twenty-first-century's answer to William Faulkner
Times Literary Supplement
Ward takes the territory made so familiar by writers such as William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, and reclaims it
Financial Times
The first novel from two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, a timeless Southern fable of brotherly love and familial conflict
Joshua and Christophe are twins, raised by a blind grandmother and a large extended family in a rural town on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. Over the course of a single, life-changing summer, as they struggle to find work and contend with the reappearance of their parents – Cille, who left town for a better job, and Sandman, a dangerous addict – the brothers are forced into a series of decisions that will ultimately damn or save them.
A delicate and closely observed portrait of fraternal love and strife and the bonds that can sustain and torment us, Where the Line Bleeds marks the beginning of Jesmyn Ward’s extraordinary career in fiction.