Description

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.

Publisher Review

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 *