If I survive you

Author

Jonathan Escoffery

Call Number

• FICTION ESCO (CEN, OSH)

Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York : MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.

Physical Description

260 pages ; 22 cm

Summary

"A collection of humorous and harrowing linked stories following a Jamaican-American family as they seek stability upon moving to Miami"--

In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what their younger son, Trelawny, calls "the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive."

Contents

• In flux
• Under the ackee tree
• Odd jobs
• Pestilence
• Splashdown
• Independent living
• If he suspected he'd get someone killed this morning, Delano would never leave his couch
• If I survive you.