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Sonatas for the Dead is a tapestry of black life across time and continents.
A formerly enslaved woman remembers the sound of Confederate soldiers’ boots seven decades later. A blind savant learns to play eight thousand songs on the piano. A child wanders through hurricane-ravaged neighborhoods looking for precious metals in the ruins.
In JJ Amaworo Wilson’s stunning debut short story collection, Black life is presented as picaresque, wry, and miraculous. Struggle is leavened by humor, the laughter in the dark of those who know things might get worse before they get better. The cast of characters includes scrappers and soldiers, musicians and murderers, researchers and revolutionaries. They are steeped in both the wisdom of the ancestors and the wisdom of the street, as their lives get subsumed in the tides of history.
With his trademark lyrical prose and flights of surrealism, Amaworo Wilson gives us a treasure trove of Black experience, an unforgettable mosaic of grief and joy.
“Stunning…alight with humor, ingenuity, and surprise. A singular voice in contemporary fiction.”
—Adrienne Celt, author of End of the World House
“Extraordinary and inventive…Amaworo Wilson is a word magician.”
—Denise Chavez, author of Street of Too Many Stories
“A terrific writer.”
—Sharman Apt Russell, author of What Walks This Way
“A rare and special talent.”
—Diane Lefer, author of Out of Place
“Wonderful and magical.”
—Le Monde
“Amaworo Wilson writes with deep human sympathy and memorable descriptive powers.”
—Diran Adebayo, author of Some Kind of Black
“Spectacular…intoxicating, gorgeous prose…Amaworo Wilson’s imagination seems as boundless as the world he’s created.”
—Elizabeth Hand, author of A Haunting on the Hill
“Amaworo Wilson writes in an epic style with postmodern irony, and draws characters that are both colourful and highly symbolic.”
—Livres Hebdo
“The author’s unflinching prose is infused with compassion, but never with sentiment, and his depiction of moral integrity in the face of everything a hostile world can throw at it is compelling and ultimately uplifting. Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez.”
—The Frogmore Papers