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Two-time US National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward's latest novel Let Us Descend tackles the hellish reality of life as a chattel slave.
Modelled on Dante's Inferno, and based on extensive historical research, the book details a gruelling journey teenager Annis makes from a North Carolina plantation to the slave markets of New Orleans.
It's being hailed as an instant classic; announced this week as Oprah's latest book club pick.
Jesmyn Ward is a professor of creative writing at Tulane University. She is the youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and a MacArthur Fellow. Her other works include novels Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones, and a memoir Men We Reaped.
