Book Club Guide

Salvage the Bones

by Jesmyn Ward · 2011 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

The hurricane you cannot outrun — and the family that holds together
Esch and the Medea parallel — the girl who will be left
The Batiste family's poverty and the specific dignity it carries

About this book

The Batiste family in rural Mississippi — three brothers, a pregnant teenage girl — prepare for Hurricane Katrina in the week before it strikes. Ward's National Book Award-winning novel is told through Esch, the lone girl, who is pregnant and reading Medea. The hurricane, when it comes, is rendered with devastating intimacy.

Published in 2011, Salvage the Bones won the National Book Award. Ward grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi, and based the Batiste family's home and community on her own.

Discussion questions

The novel is told through Esch, who is reading Medea. How does Ward use this parallel — and what does the Medea analogy say about Esch's situation?
The hurricane itself arrives late but looms over everything that precedes it. How does Ward build this dread — and how does the storm change the family?
The Batiste family are poor in a specific, particular way — their poverty is rendered with dignity rather than pathos. How does Ward achieve this?
Ward has described the novel as an attempt to write about a community that Hurricane Katrina made visible to the wider world but which had always been there. How does the novel address this visibility — and what does fiction give the community that journalism could not?
Salvage the Bones won the National Book Award. What does it do that earns this recognition — and how does it relate to Ward's later Sing, Unburied, Sing?