Book of the Week: IF I SURVIVE YOU by Jonathan Escoffery
If I Survive You, short-listed for the year's Booker Prize, is the debut novel-in-stories from American writer Jonathan Escoffery. Variously described as energetic, commanding, sure-footed, astute, tender, and funny, If I Survive You takes on racism, hurricanes, and recessions alongside the existential crisis of identity and belonging of Trelawny, the son of Jamaican immigrants in Miami with style and sharp observation.
What the Booker judges say: “In Jonathan Escoffery’s vital, captivating debut novel, each chapter takes us deeper into a family album of stories, revealing the life and survival of a family, fleeing the violence of early Seventies’ Jamaica for the uncertain sanctuary of a new beginning in America. From the heartbreaking to the hilarious, Escoffery effortlessly conducts the various voices, contradictory in their perspectives, their dreams and desires, while wrestling with the age-old immigrant dilemma — who are my people and where do I belong? As with the best fiction, all of life is here in unflinching detail: the vagaries of capitalism, our yearning for a safety net, international migration, the American Dream, the fragility of existence, climate change, catastrophic misunderstandings and the road not taken."
"I knew from the outset that I wanted to structure it in such a way that the chapters worked as standalone stories, and the stories worked as chapters that built toward a larger narrative arc and toward a climax. I wanted to challenge myself, and thought this would be formally interesting, if not innovative, but I also suspect it closely resembles the episodic nature of human experience. It was when I stopped worrying about whether to label it as stories or as a novel that it finally came together."