Where the Line Bleeds

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.

“A lyrical yet clear-eyed portrait of a rural South and an African-American reality that are rarely depicted”

Boston Globe

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University. She is the author of the novels Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award, and Sing, Unburied, Sing, which won the 2017 National Book Award. She is also the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time and the author of the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2016, the American Academy of Arts and Letters selected Ward for the Strauss Living Award, and in 2017 she was awarded a MacArthur 'Genius' Award. She lives in Mississippi with her family.

@jesmimi

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