Let Us Descend

Jesmyn Ward’s novel follows Annis, a young enslaved woman in the years before the Civil War who is sold away from her mother and marched south to the slave markets of New Orleans and beyond. Drawing on African spirituality, Ward surrounds Annis with spirits and ancestors as she endures unspeakable suffering and searches for a way to survive. Lyrical and haunting, it is a reckoning with the horrors of slavery.