Saw the walking wound I was, and came to be my balm. Saw past skin the colour of unmilked coffee, eyes black, lips the colour of plums, and saw me. …from the first moment I saw him walking across the grass to where I sat in the shadow of the school sign, he saw me. As a result, she is forever seeking those moments, she is trapped in hedonistic romanticism, she has eyes only for Michael and is unable to embrace, and often rejects motherhood – or as her mother feared, perhaps she never had a maternal instinct at all. Leonie falls so quickly for Michael, she is blind to the bind she must endure, that of premature motherhood when she has barely experienced or indulged sufficiently the early infatuation of young love. In its telling, it traverses love, grief, terminal illness, addiction, prejudice, dysfunctional parenting, hope and survival, the effect this mix has on everyone touched by it, the painful and the poignant.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is set in the same Southern US community, putting us amidst a struggling mixed race family, a young black woman Leonie, who fell in love with Michael from a racist white family implicated in a tragedy that affected her family. The family within which that story was set were already suffering poverty and the loss of the mother they had little, yet what they had meant so much, creating a foreboding sense of much being at stake, it was thrilling and terrifying reading. Salvage the Bones was set during the period just before and during Hurricane Katrina, one that would claim lives and livelihoods, wreaking havoc on New Orleans and the surrounding area. In 2017, I read Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones, it was hurricane season in the US, and the news was full of the fearful anticipation of the destruction they would bring and we were already seeing how many small islands in the Caribbean had been devastated.

Salvage the bones synopsis