If I Survive You

A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family striving for more in Miami, and introduces a generational storyteller. In the 1970s, Tunde, a newly arrived Jamaican immigrant, plants his flag in Miami with barely a penny to his name and a single, unshakeable belief: he will build a fortune in this promised land. Forty years later, his sprawling family is unmoored, each member ensnared by their own quiet desperation and small betrayals. His oldest son has become a dangerous man. His daughter-in-law is cracking under the weight of secrets. His youngest son is a third-generation addict. And Tunde's greatest achievement—raising a family in a new nation—has begun to unravel. Tunde's grandson Zein is coming of age in transient Miami, watching his family members claw at each other for love, stability, and respect. As Zein struggles to carve out his own identity, he takes us through the lives of his family members, showing us their migrations and transformations, their survival and resistance, their desperate, dogged belief in the future. With unflinching precision and remarkable empathy, Akwaeke Emezi examines the price of the American dream through one family's reckoning, and reveals how the most painful heartbreak is the one we inflict on those we love most.