Men We Reaped

'A brutal, moving memoir. Anyone who emerges from America's black working-class youth with words as fine as Ward's deserves a hearing'. - Guardian. 'Raw, beautiful and dangerous'. - New York Times Book Review. 'Lavishly endowed with literary craft and hard-earned wisdom'. - Time. The beautiful, haunting memoir from Jesmyn Ward, the first woman to win the National Book Award twice. 'And then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped' - Harriet Tubman. Jesmyn Ward's acclaimed memoir shines a light on the community she comes from in the small town of DeLisle, Mississippi, a place of quiet beauty and fierce attachment. Here, in the space of four years, she lost five young black men dear to her, including her beloved brother - to accidents, murder and suicide. Their deaths were seemingly unconnected, yet their lives had been connected by identity and place. As Jesmyn dealt with these losses, she came to a staggering truth: the fates of these young men were predetermined by who they were and where they were from, because racism and economic struggle breed a certain kind of bad luck. The agonising reality brought Jesmyn to write, at last, their true stories and her own. 'Acute and often beautiful'. - Financial Times. 'Haunting'. - Laurie Penny, New Statesman Books of the Year. 'Elegiac, rage-filled, and uncommonly brave'. - Vogue. 'A brilliant book about beauty and death'. - Los Angeles Times. 'Essential'. - San Francisco Chronicle. 'Burns with brilliance'. - Harper's Bazaar. 'Unvarnished and penetrating'. - Elle.