If I Survive You

"Shortlist"

"This much-buzzed book of interlinked short stories that has already been nominated for a host of other prizes including America’s National Book Award, the NBCC’s John Leonard Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. If I Survive You portrays members of a Jamaican family making their lives in Miami from the 1970s onwards; its eight-part structure makes it more of a fictional mosaic than a straightforward story. This prompted a little grousing over the book’s eligibility, although the Booker rules simply state that books under consideration should be “unified and substantial”—the family is the thread that binds Escoffery’s episodes together. Despite its sometimes heavy subject matter—characters face poverty, racism, and tricky family dynamics—it has a “peacocking humor, capers, and passages of shuddering eroticism”, said The New Yorker: Escoffery’s inventive and experimental approach to fiction “is marked by ingenuity.” If you’d like to get more of a sense of the style, his story Pestilence is available online at Electric Literature ."

"I could say something buttoned-up, like “Jonathan Escoffery’s debut collection of short stories examines race, identity and class in incisive ways.” And that’d be true, but phrasing it that way betrays the lack of didacticism in his writing. Instead, the book – which follows generations of one Jamaican American family – focuses on the hunger (literal and figurative), heartbreak, horniness and (maybe?) hope that often come hand-in-hand with trying to make it in this country."