Men We Reaped

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What to expect

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'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
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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.
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'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

Critics Review

  • 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
  • When I first read her memoir, Men We Reaped – about five young black men, all of whom died within a span of four years of four years in her life – I understood the weight of grief as one struggles to live She is a modern-day William Faulkner, painting tapestries of an America that has not been heard

    Lee Daniels, Oscar-nominated director and producer
  • Raw, beautiful and dangerous … Ward’s singular voice and her full embrace of her anger and sorrow set this work apart from those that have trodden similar ground

    New York Times Book Review
  • Acute and often beautiful

    Financial Times
  • Haunting

    New Statesman Books of the Year
  • Elegiac, rage-filled, and uncommonly brave

    Vogue

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