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The Booker Prize shortlisted literary debut: ‘So damn funny’ – Rumaan Alam

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.

Reviews

‘Blistering … Escoffery writes stinging sentences’ The Times ‘All of life is here in unflinching detail: the fragility of existence, the American dream and the road not taken’ The Booker Prize Judges ‘Thrilling … With much tenderness in the gulf between father and son’ Observer ‘So brilliant it stopped me in my tracks … Astonishing’ iNews ‘Brilliantly energetic… his talent feels fully formed and raring to go’ Financial Times ‘Unmissable… rare in that it has the heft and heart of a novel, with the refined finesse of the short story’ Irish Times ‘Surges with the symphonic, imaginative, propulsive energy of Gabriel García Márquez’ Guardian ‘A compelling hurricane of a book’ Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House Profound, tender, and laugh-out-loud hilarious, If I Survive You will knock you off your feet and keep you spellbound to the very last page … A must-read. Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for The Booker Prize ‘Superb… a much-needed new voice’ Percival Everett, author of Erasure 'This I adore… Sumptuous and astute' Diana Evans, author of Ordinary People ‘An elegant meditation on belonging from a powerful new writer’ Nikesh Shukla, author of Brown Baby ‘A dazzling mirror held up to our identity-obsessed time’ Joyce Carol Oates, author of Blonde ‘A gifted, sure-footed storyteller’ New York Times ‘Like nothing you've read before’ Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings ‘So damn funny’ Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind