Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You!

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.”
ABOUT THE WRITER: Jonathan Escoffery is the author of the linked story collection, If I Survive You, a National Book Award Nominee, an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence Nominee, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and an Indie National Bestseller. If I Survive You has been named a ‘best’ or ‘most anticipated’ book by The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, Oprah Daily, Good Morning America online, Goodreads, BuzzFeed, Vulture, L.A. Times, Shondaland, TIME, The Root, Vanity Fair, Kirkus, The Millions, BET, O Quarterly Magazine, Real Simple, and elsewhere.
"A ravishing debut . . . There’s peacocking humor, capers, and passages of shuddering eroticism. The book feels thrillingly free . . . [Escoffery's] stories also stress the ebullience, the possibility, that can emerge from in-betweenness.” ―Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
"Not since Moby Dick has the all-American ethos of 'sink or swim' on your own been dramatized to such devastating effect. If I Survive You is an extraordinary debut collection, an intensively granular, yet panoramic depiction of what it's like to try to make it ― or not ― in this kaleidoscopic madhouse of a country." ―Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
"Jonathan Escoffery’s radiant collection of linked stories, If I Survive You, may well be the buzziest debut of 2022. . . . In crystalline prose, Escoffery evokes the fluorescent textures of Miami, tapping Caribbean traditions, immigrant aspirations, and familial and communal bonds." ―Hamilton Cain, OprahDaily