Sing, Unburied, Sing BY JESMYN WARD (Scribner)

“Sing, Unburied, Sing” is built around an arduous car trip when a black woman and her children drive to a state penitentiary to pick up their white father. The narration passes back and forth between the convict’s 13-year-old son and his drug-addled mother, Leonie. Ward draws us deep into the bile of a woman who sometimes dislikes her children and often resents their claims on her. But Leonie’s failings, which she knows are numerous, have been aggravated by addiction, grief and a racist culture that offers her no opportunity and little justice. These are people “pulling all the weight of history.” Ward, one of the most powerfully poetic writers in the country, represents those necrotic claims with a pair of restless ghosts, the unburied singers of the title, who speak to Leonie and her son. The plight of this one family is tied to intersecting crimes that stretch over decades.