In 2020 Jonathan Escoffery won the Paris Review’s Plimpton prize for his story “Under the Ackee Tree”. Written in the second person, in Jamaican patois, the tale reappears in Escoffery’s debut, If I Survive You – a “novel-in-stories”, according to this year’s Booker prize committee, who recently shortlisted it for this year’s award. Straddling two literary forms, Escoffery has something in common with his protagonist, Trelawny, the American-born son of immigrant parents who fled political violence in Jamaica for a new life in Miami. Trelawny, whose older brother, Delano, was born in Jamaica, is struggling to figure out how he fits into American life, with its polarized take on race.

“It begins with What are you? hollered from the perimeter of your front yard when you’re nine – younger, probably”, Escoffery writes at the start of “In Flux”, which opens the book: an astute use of the second person to draw in anyone who has ever wondered about their identity and belonging. “The few decidedly Black kids in school find you befuddling. They are among the first to insist that you state your allegiance. ‘Are you Black?’ they demand. You’re a rather pale shade of brown, if skin colour has anything to do with race.” When the family flees Miami-Dade after “a hurricane named Andrew pops your house’s roof open, peeling it back like the lid of a Campbell’s soup can” – Escoffery has a good line in figuration – Trelawny’s new classmates assume he is Puerto Rican until it emerges that he doesn’t speak Spanish. But then settling for being Black proves less simple than it sounds.

To compound Trelawny’s crisis, his feckless father, Topper, walks out on him and his mother, Sanya, taking Delano with him. This betrayal fuels the father-son conflict at this novel’s heart – a conflict Escoffery revisits in his fifth story, “Splashdown”, in which we meet Delano and Trelawny’s cousin, Cukie, who has an errant father of his own. As Trelawny grows up his search for somewhere he can call home becomes practical as well as emotional: he spends most of the time living out of his car, a member of the “nouveau hobo” class. Meanwhile, his actual family home – which has been patched up by Topper, a builder by trade, along with the teenage Delano (still, at the time, in the process of “constructing manhood”) – ends up slowly sinking...