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If I Survive You
Author: Jonathan Escoffery
Published: 2023
Pages: 260
Project: Identity – hybrid cultural | racial
Prize: Recent Prize Short List (Shortlist, Man Booker 2023)
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In Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You, a Jamaican family struggles to survive in America, facing racism, financial disaster, and bad luck. The novel centers on Trelawny as he navigates homelessness and odd jobs while his brother and cousin grapple with their own challenges. Escoffery’s debut masterfully explores themes of identity, resilience, and the harsh realities of capitalism.
Complexity
CEFR: B2/C1
Plot Complexity: moderate
Language Complexity: moderate
Ideas Complexity: rich
Blurb
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.”
Masterfully constructed with heart and humor, the linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You center on Trelawny as he struggles to carve out a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism, and flat-out bad luck. After a fight with Topper–himself reckoning with his failures as a parent and his longing for Jamaica–Trelawny claws his way out of homelessness through a series of odd, often hilarious jobs. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab to get his kids back, and his cousin, Cukie, looks for a father who doesn’t want to be found. As each character searches for a foothold, they never forget the profound danger of climbing without a safety net.
Pulsing with vibrant lyricism and inimitable style, sly commentary and contagious laughter, Escoffery’s debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and whiteness. With If I Survive You, Escoffery announces himself as a prodigious storyteller in a class of his own, a chronicler of American life at its most gruesome and hopeful.
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