Let Us Descend, Jesmyn Ward’s fourth novel, is a lush and harrowing journey through the American antebellum South. Its title comes from a line in Dante’s Inferno, a poem that traverses the circles of hell, and it follows Annis, a young, enslaved woman, from the moonlit forests of North Carolina through the slave markets of New Orleans to a Louisiana sugar plantation.

Annis is the granddaughter of an African warrior queen who birthed Annis’s mother on the slave ship passage. She is the only child of her mother, who was raped by their slaveholder, a white man they call “the sire”. The novel deals in themes common to Ward’s work – the relationship between displacement, oppression, and race; the thin veil between the living and the dead – and centralises black female lineage.

“The sire” separates mother and daughter, selling Annis to “the Georgia Man” after he comes upon her kissing Safi, another young slave woman. On the barefoot, rope-bound march through the Deep South, Annis discovers her world is a “wide, cry-choked hell” of suffering and starvation; it is “thick with spirits” who are as capricious as they are nurturing. The foremost is Mama Aza, the “storm-born spirit”. She follows Annis to the Louisiana plantation but doesn’t save her from back-breaking work or the torture of “the hole”, an earthen prison. In a world where even the spirits fail and abuse her, what saves Annis is the irrepressible will to live, passed down to her by her foremothers.

[ Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward review: Deep darkness in the Deep SouthOpens in new window ]

Ward, a rare two-time winner of the National Book Award, has written a character and a realm with profound and sensory feeling. Her prose doesn’t beautify a world that’s torturous, but rather, the veins of love and the moments of safety in this hellish plenum are beautifully alive and luminous. Ward’s previous three novels were set in Bois Sauvage, a place based on her hometown of DeLisle, Mississippi, which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The morning Let Us Descend arrived in my post, there was a newswire story about Noni Battiste-Kosoko, a 19-year-old black woman who was found “alone, face down and unresponsive” in a detention centre run by the prison authority that recently booked Trump. Noni was her mother’s only child. The era and the Inferno framework of Let Us Descend make it a departure for the author. But alongside a reality such as Noni’s, it feels like Ward is still writing close to home.