In his wonderfully cranky Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner exhorted his fellow writers to create from the heart…Address the immortal truths, he instructed: "love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice." The novelist Jesmyn Ward pinned this speech above her desk. Her memoir and three novels…feel hewn from these grand Faulknerian verities. Not for her the austerity and self-conscious ironies of so much American fiction; her books reach for the sweep, force and sense of inevitability of the Greek myths, but as translated to the small, mostly poor, mostly black town in Mississippi where she grew up and where she still lives…[Sing, Unburied, Sing] is Ward's most unsparing book…With the supernatural cast to the story, everything feels heightened. The clearest influence is Toni Morrison's Beloved—the child returning from the dead, bitter and wronged and full of questions. The echoes in the language feel like deliberate homage.
The New York Times – Parul Sehgal