Toni Morrison

There’s a chapter in this mostly illuminating and occasionally irritating book in which the author – the award-winning writer of The Hours and other acclaimed novels – explains why he no longer reads reviews of his work. The decision was prompted first by an ‘excoriating’ hatchet job by Michiko Kakutani, erstwhile lead literary critic of the New York Times. ‘A worse review is difficult to imagine,’ Cunningham notes, claiming that he has ‘mostly repressed the memory’ of its contents, though he does share his rather macabre plan for revenge: to slip a copy of the book into her coffin so that ‘extra-terrestrial archaeologists’ will assume she wanted to be buried with it.

Jesmyn Ward, America’s only female two-time National Book Award winner, has had more than her share of hellish experiences to fuel her literary life. Her Mississippi-based family endured Hurricane Katrina. Salvage the Bones (2011), set during the catastrophe, was Ward’s response. Her memoir, Men We Reaped (2013), tackled her grief at losing five men close to her, including her brother, who was killed, aged 19, by a drunk driver. In January 2020, Ward’s husband died of acute respiratory distress syndrome. Ward recreates the hell of the antebellum South for the ‘stolen’ people forced into chattel slavery Hell is very much the context for her fourth novel, Let Us Descend.