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Jesmyn Ward’s third novel returns to the same setting that served her so well in both her debut Where the Line Bleeds (2008) and the National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones (2011): the fictional rural town of Bois Sauvage on the Mississippi Gulf Coast It’s the kind of place that worms its way into a person’s being; thirteen-year-old Jojo, one of the novel’s three narrators, is described by another as ‘carry[ing] the scent of leaves disintegrating to mud at the bottom of a river, the aroma of the bowl of the bayou, heavy with water and sediment and the skeletons of small dead creatures, crab, fish, snakes, and shrimp’ It’s also the kind of place that eats away at its inhabitants’ souls, rife with poverty, a meth epidemic, and racism ‘This ain’t the old days,’ shouts a white father at his eighteen-year-old son, slapping him across the face and calling him a ‘fucking idiot’  for shooting one of his black schoolmates when the latter wins a bet The dead teenager – a high school football star and a crack shot with a bow and arrow (he bet his murderer that he could use this to take down a buck before the rifle-toting white boy could) – was Given, brother of Leonie (the second of the narrators) and uncle to her son Jojo, or he would have been if he’d lived long enough to meet his nephew   Sing, Unburied, Sing – the winner of the 2017 National Book Award for fiction – opens on Jojo’s thirteenth birthday Eager to prove himself a man, he’s helping his grandfather, Pop, to slaughter a goat: ‘I want Pop to know I can get bloody’ Given all we know about the perilous situation for young black men in America, it’s impossible to read this opening scene without a tremor of fear There by the Grace of God goes Jojo So many others before him cut down in their prime: his uncle Given, of course, and Ritchie, a young man who was in Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, with Jojo’s grandfather back in the day Ward has addressed