If I Survive You
Jonathan Escoffery
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A major debut that follows a Jamaican family in Miami navigating recession, racism and Hurricane Andrew.
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, 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 increasingly pitted against one another. Will their rivalry be the thing that finally tears their family apart?
If I Survive You pulses with inimitable style, heart and barbed humour while unravelling what it means to carve out an existence between cultures, homes and pay checks. It announces Jonathan Escoffery as a chronicler of life at its most gruesome and hopeful.
About the Author
Jonathan Escoffery is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction and Electric Literature, and has been anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing. He received his MFA from the University of Minnesota, is a PhD fellow in the University of Southern California’s PhD in Creative Writing and Literature Program, and in 2021 was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University.
Book Details:
Published: February 2024
ISBN: 9780008501242
Format: Paperback
Page extent: 272 pages
