In the Margins Book Club Chats LET US DESCEND **IN-PERSON**

Join us for our book club led by Sarah @bookishandblack! Formerly known as the Well-Read Black Girl book club, our In The Margins book club continues to focus on typically "marginalized" authors who create works of fiction and nonfiction that we adore! Sarah will lead her thoughtful, fun discussions  in-person at Locavino in downtown Silver Spring on the fourth Monday of the month at 7PM! Grab a glass of wine or some yummy food or just come hang and discuss great books with likeminded readers. This month, the book club will be chatting about Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward! This space is created to be a safe and centering space for all readers with a focus on championing the voices most often silenced in our society. 

Enjoy an extended happy hour deal of 25% off all glass pours & appetizers at Locavino when you mention you're part of the book club happy hour. Please RSVP using the form below to let us know you'll be joining us for this month's meeting so that we can reserve enough seats. Email us at events@loyaltybookstores.com with any questions.

Use coupon code BKCB2020 at checkout online for 10% off each month's book club selection or mention it is a book club at checkout in either store! 

ABOUT THE BOOK

From Jesmyn Ward—the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow—comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War.

“‘Let us descend,’ the poet now began, ‘and enter this blind world.’” — Inferno, Dante Alighieri

Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.

Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.

From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward’s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jesmyn Ward is the author of Where the Line Bleeds, Salvage the Bones, and Men We Reaped. She is a former Stegner Fellow (Stanford University) and Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is an associate professor of Creative Writing at Tulane University.

Her work has appeared in BOMB, A Public Space and The Oxford American.

ABOUT THE HOST

Sarah Coquillat is the bookworm behind Bookish and Black. A health policy researcher by day, she created Bookish and Black to engage with other readers and encourage literary discussion. Sarah is passionate about social justice and reading BIPOC authors.

Please note Loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during our virtual and in-person events.