Salvage the Bones

Salvage the Bones follows the Batistes, a working-class African-American family in southern Mississippi, as they prepare for Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and live through its aftermath. The narrator is Esch, the only daughter, who lives with her father and her brothers Randall, Skeetah and Junior; their mother died giving birth to Junior. Skeetah is devoted to his pit bull, China, who has a litter of puppies as the book begins, and Esch discovers that she is pregnant. Jesmyn Ward, who lived through Katrina herself, has said she drew on Medea and the work of William Faulkner.