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If I Survive You


Jonathan Escoffery


'Kaleidoscopic, urgent, hilarious, revelatory' Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings


'A compelling hurricane of a book' Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House


A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family in Miami navigating recession, racism and Hurricane Andrew.

You want a home.

You want to win back your girlfriend's admiration.

You want to prove that your father bet on the wrong son.

1979. Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But they soon learn that the welcome in America will be far from warm.

Trelawny, their youngest son, comes of age in a society which regards him with suspicion and confusion, greeting him with the puzzled question 'What are you?'

Their eldest son Delano's longing for a better future for his own children is equalled only by his recklessness in trying to secure it.

As both brothers navigate the obstacles littered in their path - an unreliable father, racism, a financial crisis and Hurricane Andrew - they find themselves pitted against one another. Will their rivalry be the thing that finally tears their family apart?

The thrilling linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery's If I Survive You pulse with inimitable style, heart and barbed humour while unravelling what it means to carve out an existence between cultures, homes and pay checks. They announce Escoffery as a once in a generation talent and chronicler of life at its most gruesome and hopeful.

Jonathan Escoffery is the author of If I Survive You, forthcoming Sept. 6th, 2022 from MCDxFSG (U.S.) and McClelland and Stewart (Canada). It will be published in the UK and Commonwealth by 4th Estate Books (Feb 2, 2023), and will be published in translation in France by Albin Michel and in Germany by Piper Verlag (January 26, 2023).

Jonathan is the winner of The Paris Review’s 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and is the recipient of a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts (Prose) Literature Fellowship. His story “Under the Ackee Tree” was among the trio that won the Paris Review the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction from the American Society of Magazine Editors, and was subsequently included in The Best American Magazine Writing 2020. His stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Oprah Daily, Electric Literature, Zyzzyva, AGNI, Pleiades, American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Passages North, and elsewhere.

Jonathan has taught creative writing and seminars on the writer’s life at Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, the Center for Fiction, Tin House, Writers in Progress, and at GrubStreet in Boston, where, as former staff, he founded the Boston Writers of Color Group, which currently has more than 2,000 members. He has received support and honors from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, Aspen Words, Kimbilio Fiction, the Anderson Center, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s Creative Writing MFA Program (Fiction) and attends the University of Southern California’s Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature Program as a Provost Fellow. He is a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Category:  Contemporary Fiction
ISBN:  9780008501228
Publisher:  HarperCollins Publishers
On sale:  October 2022
Format:  Paperback
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