~ Trade Paperback
~ Winner of the Libby Award for Best Historical Fiction - 2024
~ New Release - 2024
Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, struggles through the miles-long march turning inward to seek comfort among the memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother . . .
A reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching, Let Us Descend is searching, harrowing, and replete with transcendent love as it journeys from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.
Angry, beautiful, raw, visceral, and heartfelt, Let Us Descend is the literary equivalent of an open wound from which poetry pours. Ward has taken Black history in a time of racial and political turmoil and used it to scream about grief and injustice, but also about beauty, queer love, history, determination, and joy.” -- NPR