Sing, Unburied, Sing
Bois Sauvage • Book 3
by Jesmyn Ward
Narrated by Kelvin Harrison Jr., Chris Chalk, Rutina Wesley
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
Three voices share this narration, and one of them belongs to a ghost who won't let Mississippi forget.
- Great if you want: literary fiction that's also genuinely haunting and emotionally shattering
- Listening experience: slow, lyrical, and heavy — demands full attention, not background listening
- Narration: full cast of three; each narrator disappears completely into their character
- Skip if: supernatural elements woven into realist fiction feel jarring to you
About This Audiobook
Sing, Unburied, Sing follows twelve-year-old Jojo, his toddler sister Kayla, and their drug-addicted mother Leonie on a road trip from rural Mississippi to Parchman Farm prison to collect Leonie's boyfriend. Jesmyn Ward writes a novel haunted in the literal sense — by the ghost of Leonie's dead brother, by the ghost of a boy who died at Parchman decades ago — and in the moral sense, by the accumulated history of racial violence in Mississippi. The novel won the National Book Award and multiple other major prizes for its extraordinary synthesis of the mythic and the particular.
The full-cast production with Kelvin Harrison Jr., Chris Chalk, and Rutina Wesley gives Ward's ensemble the necessary voices — each narrator distinct, each carrying a different relationship to the story's hauntings. The audio format honors the novel's polyphonic construction. At just over eight hours the audiobook delivers one of the most decorated works of fiction in recent memory.