Edward P. Jones – författare

Masterful, Pulitzer-prize winning literary epic about the painful and complex realities of slave life on a Southern plantation. An utterly original exploration of race, trust and the cruel truths of human nature, this is a landmark in modern American literature.Henry Townsend, a black farmer, boot maker, and former slave, becomes proprietor of his own plantation – as well as his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend household, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave ‘speculators’ sell free black people into slavery, and rumours of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.An ambitious, luminously written novel that ranges from the past to the present, The Known World seamlessly weaves together the lives of the freed and the enslaved – and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multi-dimensional world created by the institution of slavery.

The 2004 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction returns with a collection of 14 short stories, rife with characters who will stay with you well beyond the last pageEdward P. Jones, the bestselling and prize-winning author of ‘The Known World’, returns to the form that first inspired him – the short storyIn this collection, Jones returns to the city that inspired his first book, ‘Lost in the City’. This is the story of Washington DC, a city full of bustling life, bursting forth from the banks of the swampy Potomac. These are the stories of the city's ordinary inhabitants, its labourers and lawyers, sailors and nuns, children and pensioners – people who in Jones's masterful hands emerge as fully human and morally complex.Casting his net wide, Jones explores the American Dream on an epic canvas, from the dawn of the twentieth century until modern times. His memorable cast of characters find themselves caught between the old ways of the agricultural America of their past and the temptations of the big city, struggling against the inequities locked within slavery's legacy.Both witty and poignant, touching and shocking, this collection is sure to make a lasting impression and further confirm Jones as one of the masters of the genre.