Jesmyn Ward’s new novel, Let Us Descend, has been eagerly anticipated since it was announced, and comes six years after her last. Ward has won the National Book Award twice – for Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones (2011). Her memoir Men We Reaped also won multiple awards. Ward’s writing moves from strength to strength; this new novel is being hailed as a masterpiece.

With such expectations, surely there will come a fall? Well, yes, but it’s not a failure to deliver on potential or a fall from grace for Ward, it’s a descent (further) into hell for her main character, Arese, more widely known as Annis. Ward’s earlier novels were set in contemporary Mississippi, but in this piercing examination of grief and identity, Ward takes the reader back to a time before the American Civil War. Annis is a young enslaved person who, shortly after her mother is sold, is forced to undertake a treacherous journey from a rice plantation in the Carolinas to a sugar plantation in Louisiana, via New Orleans.

Let Us Descend openly references Dante’s circles of hell, and it is not a stretch to say that in her portrayal of the lives of enslaved people in the American South, and aboard the original ships that took enslaved people there, Ward conjures the bone-grinding reality of the horrors of slavery, and creates as convincing a vision of physical and emotional hell as any you will ever read. Ward’s writing is extraordinary: this is a novel about some of the most inexplicable and cruel human behaviours and systems, and of what it is like to live through them, yet despite viscerally transporting the reader into this world, Ward also opens up inner lives, in parallel, with magnetic, transcendent empathy.

As in her earlier works, there are many layers to this novel, and it is impossible to condense its accomplishments into this short space. But for its imagining of how the human spirit could survive the worst inhumanities an individual and a society could inflict upon other humans, it is possibly unmatched. Annis and the ephemeral Mama Aza are unforgettable, as are the vital stories they tell themselves