Census, Jesse Ball
Census, Jesse Ball
List: $17.99 | Sale: $12.59
Club: $8.99

Census

Author: Jesse Ball

Narrator: Chris Andrew Ciulla

Unabridged: 4 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 03/06/2018


Synopsis

A powerful and moving new novel from an award-winning, acclaimed author: in the wake of a devastating revelation, a father and son journey north across a tapestry of towns.When a widower receives notice from a doctor that he doesn’t have long left to live, he is struck by the question of who will care for his adult son—a son whom he fiercely loves, a boy with Down syndrome. With no recourse in mind, and with a desire to see the country on one last trip, the man signs up as a census taker for a mysterious governmental bureau and leaves town with his son.Traveling into the country, through towns named only by ascending letters of the alphabet, the man and his son encounter a wide range of human experience. While some townspeople welcome them into their homes, others who bear the physical brand of past censuses on their ribs are wary of their presence. When they press toward the edges of civilization, the landscape grows wilder, and the towns grow farther apart and more blighted by industrial decay. As they approach “Z,” the man must confront a series of questions: What is the purpose of the census? Is he complicit in its mission? And just how will he learn to say good-bye to his son?Mysterious and evocative, Census is a novel about free will, grief, the power of memory, and the ferocity of parental love, from one of our most captivating young writers.

About Jesse Ball

Jesse Ball is the author of fifteen books, and his works have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction and the Gordon Burn Prize, and was long-listed for the National Book Award. 


Reviews

Goodreads review by Angela M on February 14, 2018

There were a few times that I wanted to put this book aside because I wasn’t getting what was happening in this society, this country with unnamed towns designated by letters from A-Z. I wasn’t understanding what this census was all about, why this unnamed agency of the government was conducting it.......more

Goodreads review by Meike on September 29, 2019

Winner of the Gordon Burn Prize 2018 Jesse Ball's brother Abram, who suffered from Down syndrome, was only 24 years old when he passed away. Ball dedicated this book to him, and as he had planned his life assuming that he will one day become Abram's primary caretaker, this is not story about two brot......more

Goodreads review by Truman32 on March 19, 2018

An unnamed widower receives news from his doctor that he is suffering from a fatal condition and will shortly die. He quits his medical practice and loads his adored son, a boy with Down Syndrome, into his car and takes off across the country to render the census. He is hoping to spend these fleetin......more