Author(s): Jonathan Escoffery

Novel | 2023 Booker long list | Short Stories | USA | Caribbean | 2023 Booker short list | Gordon Burn Prize short list 2024

'Brilliant wit, real heart and electric humour' Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

'A compelling hurricane of a book' Ann Patchett

'A welcome reminder of what fiction can do’ Rumaan Alam

A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family in Miami navigating recession, racism, generational divide, and Hurricane Andrew. You want a home. You want to win back your girlfriend’s admiration. You want to prove that your father bet on the wrong son. In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But they soon learn that the welcome in America will be far from warm. Trelawny, their youngest son, comes of age in a society which regards him with suspicion and confusion, greeting him with the puzzled question ‘What are you?’ His brother, Delano, is easier in his own skin but is forced to take increasingly desperate measures to secure a future for his children. As both brothers navigate the obstacles littered in their path—an unreliable father, racism, a financial crisis and Hurricane Andrew—they find themselves pitted against one another. Will their rivalry be the thing that finally tears their family apart? The thrilling linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You pulse with inimitable style, heart and barbed humour while unravelling what it means to carve out an existence between cultures, homes and pay checks. They announce Escoffery as a once in a generation talent and chronicler of life at its most gruesome and hopeful.

"‘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." — Booker judges' citation

'Regularly stopped me in my tracks ... an astonishing, compassionate entrance to the literary scene' i Newspaper

'A commanding debut from a talent to watch' Observer

'Brilliantly energetic ... his talent feels fully formed and raring to go; highly recommended' Financial Times

'Unmissable ... rare in that it has the heft and heart of a novel, with the refined finesse of the short story ... The only thing to do is eagerly press it into the hands of others' Irish Times

'Sings with authenticity and heart' AnOther

'[In Escoffery's hands], the second person is arresting, intimate, adventurous ... in the final pages ... surges with the symphonic, imaginative, propulsive energy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Guardian

'Ravishing ... feels thrillingly free' New Yorker

'Fiction written at the highest level ... There are no limits to where he will go' Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House

'Superb ... a beautiful economy in the telling that never sacrifices the depth, complexity and richness of the worlds these characters inhabit' Percival Everett, author of Erasure

'This I adore ... Sumptuous and astute, excellent on the humiliations of familial and societal experience, triumphant in its spirited retaliation' Diana Evans, author of Ordinary People

'Tender; vicious; very funny. An impassioned, singular book' Ross Raisin, author of A Natural

'An elegant meditation on belonging from a powerful new writer' Nikesh Shukla, author of Brown Baby

'I highly recommend this debut novel in stories ... a dazzling mirror held up to our identity-obsessed time' Joyce Carol Oates, author of Blonde

'A gifted, sure-footed storyteller' New York Times

'Like nothing you've read before' Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings

'So damn funny ... A welcome reminder of what fiction can do' Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind

Author Biography: Jonathan Escoffery is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Passages North, Zyzzyva, and Electric Literature, and has been anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing. He received his MFA from the University of Minnesota, is a PhD fellow in the University of Southern California's PhD in Creative Writing and Literature Program, and in 2021 was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University.