Salvage the Bones

Twelve days in the Mississippi Delta before Hurricane Katrina. Esch is fifteen, pregnant, living with her father and three brothers in deep poverty, the storm coming. Ward writes in a prose so precise about the texture of this specific life — the dog fights, the egg-gathering, the pit bull about to give birth — that the catastrophe, when it arrives, lands on something you know and love. The most important American novelist alive and the most overlooked. A dispatch about what Katrina revealed about what America thinks Black Southern poverty is worth.