Ask a Bookseller: ‘Let Us Descend’ by Jesmyn Ward

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now. 

Amy Loewy of the Garden District Book Shop in New Orleans, La., knew right away which book she wanted to recommend: Jesmyn Ward’s novel “Let Us Descend.”

Ward has won the National Book Award for Fiction twice with “Sing, Unburied, Sing” (2017) and “Salvage the Bones” (2011), and Loewy says her most recent novel is a gorgeously crafted journey.

The work is deeply researched historical fiction laced with magical realism, and its title comes from a line in Dante’s “Inferno.” That’s appropriate for a hellish journey, forming an uncomfortable read — but laced with hope. 

The novel follows Anise, an enslaved woman who is separated from her mother and sold south from the Carolinas to a plantation in Louisiana. We follow Anise’s journey over land and water as well as back in time through her memories.  

“It is so magnificently written that you cannot put it down from the first paragraph,” says Loewy. Here’s how the story begins: 

“The first weapon I ever held was my mother’s hand. I was a small child then, soft at the belly. On that night, my mother woke me and led me out to the Carolina woods, deep, deep into the murmuring trees, black with the sun’s leaving. The bones in her fingers: blades in sheaths, but I did not know this yet.”