Where the Line Bleeds (Bois Sauvage #3)

Set in a rural town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, here is the story of fraternal twins Joshua & Christophe, who are graduating high school as the novel begins. The two boys both anticipate & dread their lives as adults. Joshua finds a job working as a dock laborer on the Gulf of Mexico, but Christophe has less luck: Unable to find a job, & desperate to alleviate his family’s poverty, he starts to sell drugs. Joshua does not approve, but his clumsy concern fractures the twins’ relationship. When their long-missing addict father reappears, he provokes a shocking confrontation between himself & the brothers—one that will ultimately damn or save them.

Where the Line Bleeds is unforgettable for the intense clarity of how the main relationships are rendered: the love but growing tension between the twins; their devotion to the slowly failing grandmother to raised them, & the sense of obligation they feel toward her; & most of all, the alternating pain, bewilderment, anger, & yearning they feel for the parents who abandoned them—their mother for a new life in the big city of Atlanta, & their father for drugs, prison, & even harsher debasements.

Jesmyn Ward herself grew up in a small Mississippi town near New Orleans, and this book makes palpable her deep knowledge & love of this world: black, Creole, poor, drug-riddled, yet shored by strong family ties & a sense of community that balances hope & fatalism, grief & triumph. Hers is an important new voice in American fiction, distinguished by its simple, patient, & utterly focused attentiveness to the physical details of her characters & their lives.

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan & is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University. She is the author of the novels Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award, & Sing, Unburied, Sing, which won the 2017 National Book Award.