From Jesmyn Ward—the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow—comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War.

“‘Let us descend,’ the poet now began, ‘and enter this blind world.’” —Inferno, Dante Alighieri

Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing...

'Gripping, mythic, bone-pulverising ... A spectacular achievement'

ANTHONY DOERR

'Jesmyn Ward is one of the greatest writers of all time. And Let Us Descend, once again, proves it'

JACQUELINE WOODSON

'Transcendent ... The best book I've read in years'

LOUISE KENNEDY

'Stunning ... Will grip you from the first word to the last'

NATHAN HARRIS

-----------------------

The first weapon I ever held was my mother's hand.

On a slave plantation in the Carolinas, Annis has survived in the light of he...

'Let us descend, and enter his blind world' Dante's Inferno

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 t...