If I Survive You

　　甫出道便榮獲2023布克獎決選作品
　　細膩地描繪一個移民家庭如何在美國土地上生存
 
　　七零年代，為擺脫牙買加的暴政，Topper和Sanya帶著孩子逃到了邁阿密，然而這塊土地，卻遠非這家人心目中的應許之地。作爲黑人，他們遭受社會的排擠，但依然在安德魯颶風的天災，和2008經濟衰退的摧殘下，即便連家裡養的那缸寵物魚，都寧願從水裡掙脫選擇自殺，但他們依然努力在這塊土地上生活著。
 
　　然而小兒子Trelawny卻苦於在身份認同上掙扎，在邁阿密長大的他，不夠深的膚色讓他被誤以為是多明尼加人，但上大學時，去到幾乎都是白人的中西部，他又毫無疑問地是個正宗黑人。沒有人能夠正面回答他，他到底是誰。
 
　　Trelawny在找到屬於自己一席之地的路上跌跌撞撞，甚至惡運還連連找上門。在和Topper大吵一架後，離家出走的他為維持生計，開始了一連串莫名其妙的打工。同個時間，他的哥哥和表弟也都各自面臨了人生的困境。

　　這本獨特而充滿活力的處女作，作者靈活地運用不同人稱視角，在英語和牙買加方言之間流暢切換，栩栩描繪出了邁阿密的日常風景。並進一步揭露了在白人主義和資本主義為控制方的世界下，弱勢的家庭和文化的恐懼感與自我厭惡如何錯綜複雜，呈現美國生活殘酷卻又充滿希望的一面。(文／博客來外文館)

FINALIST FOR THE 2023 BOOKER PRIZE. LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION.

Finalist for the 2023 Pen/Faulkner Award, the DUBLIN Literary Award, the Southern Book Award, and the Gordon Burns Award. Nominated for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the 2023 Pen/Jean Stein Open Book Award, the 2023 Pen/Bingham Prize, the 2022 Story Prize, the Dublin Literary Prize, the 2023 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the 2023 Brooklyn Library Prize, and the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize. National Bestseller. IndieNext Pick. One of The New York Times Book Review’s 100 Notable Books of 2022.

＂If I Survive You is a collection of connected short stories that reads like a novel, that reads like real life, that reads like fiction written at the highest level.＂ --Ann Patchett

A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family striving for more in Miami, and introduces a generational storyteller.

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 the 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, 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.

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 Creative Writing and Literature Program, and in 2021 was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University.