If I Survive You
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3.4 • 15 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 BOOKER PRIZE
‘Dazzling’ GUARDIAN
‘Blistering’ THE TIMES
'A delight' DIANA EVANS
‘Fiction written at the highest level’ ANN PATCHETT
'Hilarious, revelatory' MARLON JAMES
An electrifying, hilarious and deeply moving tragicomic debut novel following a Jamaican family grappling with a new life in the US.
‘What are you?’
This is the puzzled question that greets a young Trelawny growing up in a Miami where his racial ambiguity is regarded with confusion and suspicion. It’s not just his neighbours, his Jamaican parents Topper and Sanya don’t seem to understand him either. Then there’s his stubborn older brother Delano, who is determined to secure a better future for his own children, no matter what it takes.
As both brothers navigate the challenges littered in their path – a woefully unreliable father, racism, recession and even a hurricane – they find themselves increasingly at odds. Will they make it through together or must one brother’s future come at the cost of the other?
Shortlisted for the 2024 Gordon Burn Prize
‘An astonishingly assured debut novel … clarity, variety and fizzing prose’ BOOKER PRIZE JUDGES
‘So damn funny’ RUMAAN ALAM
‘Astonishing’ I NEWSPAPER
'Utterly unstoppable’ IRISH TIMES
What readers say:
‘So good it was hard to put down’
‘Humour, real feeling … totally recommend’
‘So engrossing and entertaining’
‘A must read’
About the author
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, Electric Literature and elsewhere. He is a PhD fellow at the University of Southern California and in 2021 was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. If I Survive You is his first book and was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023 and the National Book Award for Fiction in 2022.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With this spellbinding collection of interwoven stories, Jonathan Escoffery highlights the triumphs and tragedies of life as an ambitious American man of Jamaican descent—hailing from everywhere but belonging nowhere. Following the studious Trelawny and his Jamaican-born father, mother, and older brother, Escoffery chronicles how disasters (sociopolitical, financial and environmental) shape the lives of each family member in compelling, surprising and heart-wrenching ways. With characters facing the daily challenges of being considered Black in the US Midwest, vaguely Latino in Florida, and light-skinned in Jamaica, these stories illustrate the complexity of identity with great clarity. Feelings of shame, sadness, apathy and violence bubble up to the surface in surprising bursts. Shifting easily from standard English to Jamaican patois and back, If I Survive You is an illuminating and witty debut from an author with an incredibly distinctive voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Escoffery's vibrant and varied debut, a linked collection, chronicles the turbulent fate of a Jamaican American family in Miami. Trelawny, the main character in most of the entries, is the younger of two sons. He questions where his light skin places him within America's racial categories and where he fits into family hierarchy: "You want to prove your father bet on the wrong son," Trelawny narrates in the title story, addressing his father's favorable treatment of his older brother, Delano, an arborist and musician. "In Flux" recounts Trelawny's liberal arts education as he leaves Miami and attends college in the colder, and more racially homogenous, Midwest. "Odd Jobs," "Independent Living," and the title story center on the strange and ethically dubious gigs Trelawny takes to survive, including a running stint as a voyeur for a rich Miami couple, asking himself all the while: "What kind of employee are you? And just what kind of man?" Two stories exert a thrilling dramatic pull: In "Splashdown," Trelawny's cousin Cukie learns the lobster trapping trade, and something darker, from his estranged father; and "If He Suspected He'd Get Someone Killed..." follows Delano rushing to secure a bucket truck and a tree-trimming contract before a dangerous storm arrives. This charged work keeps a tight hold on the reader. Correction: Due to an editing error, this review originally published without its star.
Customer Reviews
Life story like no others
This book is smart, full of humour, pain and the realities of the difficult journey of so many people. It is honest in the portray of some cultures and society. I had problems at times with the use of language in some passages but I admit it is a way to convey things in an effective way.
Although a sensational debut, the academic journey of the author is so well rounded that it isn’t a surprise to read about all of his literary achievements.
Survival in a harsh world
These interconnected stories about the brothers Delano and Trelawny are an excellent read ! I admire how stories of poverty, family conflict, battle against racism, survival-techniques against all the odds can be written, so that they are suspenseful and often funny. There is also a lot to learn, about Jamaica and Miami, about hurricanes, arborists, tower blocks, resilience, writing, and family. I think I can recommend it.