Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family. When the white father of Leonie's children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high Mam is dying of cancer and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.

Ward is a major American writer, multiply awarded and universally lauded, and in Sing, Unburied, Sing she is at the height of her powers. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Yet he, like so many murdered African Americans, cannot ''So many of us,' he says. As one of the 'unburied,' Richie follows a song that he believes will help him move on. It also appears in all of Ward's other novels. This speaks both to the particular energy. As the title of the novel suggests, singing is a motif that appears throughout Sing, Unburied, Sing. 'A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. The song of the world represents the spirit that, according to Mam and Pop, resides in everything on Earth. Judy Woodruff: And now a look at love, loss, class, race, and the mystical, all topics in Jesmyn Ward's latest novel, 'Sing, Unburied, Sing.' Recently named a MacArthur genius fellow, the Tulane. Judy Woodruff: And now a look at love, loss, class, race, and the mystical, all topics in Jesmyn Wards latest novel, 'Sing, Unburied, Sing.' Recently named a MacArthur genius fellow, the Tulane.

Sing unburied song