A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. 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. 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...

In Stillwater, Mississippi, in 1955, thirteen-year-old African American Rose Lee Carter looks to her family and friends to understand her place in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. Her friend Shorty wants to change things by meeting violence with violence; her best friend Hallelujah believes in the power of peaceful protests. Can one girl make a difference?

Loretta, Roly, and Aggie B. Little relate their Mississippi family's struggles and triumphs from 1927 to 1968 while struggling as sharecroppers, living under Jim Crow, and fighting for Civil Rights.

A black family living in Mississippi during the Depression of the 1930s is faced with prejudice and discrimination which its children do not understand.

Raised by his grandparents, first in Mississippi then in Wisconsin, ten-year-old Lymon moves to Chicago in 1945 to live with the mother he never knew, while yearning for his father.

Self-educated and brown-skinned, Cassie works full time in her grandmother's laundry in rural Mississippi. Illiterate and white, Judith falls for colored music and dreams of life as a big city radio star. These teenaged girls are half-sisters. And when they catch wind of their wayward father's inheritance coming down in Virginia, they hitch their hopes to a road trip together to claim what's rightly theirs.

Despondent sixteen-year-old Malcolm finds new strength and courage as he is transported between his family's modern-day Mississippi farm and the life of his ancestor Cedric Johnson, a congressional aide in post-Civil War America. Malcolm Williams feels like nothing good ever happens for teens like him in D.C. With growing violence in his neighborhood, his mother ships him off to his father's family farm in Mississippi. He learns from his great-aunt...

Ruby Bozarth, a newcomer to Rosedale, Mississippi, is also fresh to the Mississippi Bar -- and to the docket of Circuit Judge Baylor, who taps Ruby as defense counsel in a racially charged felony. The murder of a woman from one of the town's oldest families has Rosedale's upper crust howling for blood, and the prosecutor is counting on Ruby's inexperience to help him deliver a swift conviction. Ruby's client is an African American college football...

Written in a voice that's alternately humorous, lacerating, and wise, Long Division features two interwoven stories. In the first, it's 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, fourteen-year-old Citoyen "City" Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he's sent to stay with his grandmother in the small coastal community of Melahatchie, where a young girl named Baize Shephard has recently disappeared....

"Following the death of their mother from a botched backwoods abortion, the McAlister daughters have to cope with the ripple effect of this tragedy as they come of age in 1950s Mississippi and then grow up to face their own impossible choices--an unforgettable, beautiful novel that is threaded throughout with the stories of mothers and daughters in pre-Roe versus Wade America. Life heads down back alleys, takes sharp left turns. Then, one fine day...