The brothers’ hopes rely on winning money from dog fights and dreams of basketball scholarships. Esch is highly literate and streetwise, but her future already looks bleak: she is pregnant, alone with her thoughts, and doesn’t know where to turn. We see their efforts in fighting for themselves, and, when they can, caring for each other. They live a raw existence feeding off scraps in their poverty- stricken community. The children have been dealt tough cards from on- high. But even the hurricane’s threat offers little more than a menacing backdrop: the novel starts with the disaster 10 days away, and the siblings have concerns far more immediate. The all- powerful Hurricane Katrina is fast approaching the Mississippi Gulf town of Bois Sauvage, where our narrator, fifteen- year- old Esch, lives with her alcoholic father and three brothers. As you might expect, so follows a tale imbued with Biblical myth taking in life, death, suffering, and dashed with occasional light. With these words from Deuteronomy 32:39, Jesmyn Ward begins her highly impressive US National Book Award-winning novel Salvage the Bones. ‘I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal, neither is there any can deliver out of my hand’. Jim Morphy casts a critical eye over Salvage the Bones the latest novel from Jesmyn Ward.
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