for 2009. Won 2009 Audie Award for Multi-Voiced Performance of the audio version of Mudbound. Reception Reviews were generally positive : The San Antonio Express-News says "Jordan picks at the scabs of racial inequality that will perhaps never fully heal and brings just enough heartbreak to this intimate, universal tale, just enough suspense, to leave us contemplating how the lives and motives of these vivid characters might have been different." Publishers Weekly concludes "Jordan convincingly inhabits each of her narrators, though some descriptive passages can be overly florid, and the denouement is a bit maudlin. But these are minor blemishes on a superbly rendered depiction of the fury and terror wrought by racism." Emma Hagestadt in The Independent wrote "Adultery and alcoholism, rough justice and racism may be the stock in trade of any number of Southern novels, but Jordan neatly sidesteps pat endings and solutions. The novel's alternating narrative voices work well. Only Ronsel's wartime flashbacks, which are uneasily shoe-horned into the homespun domestic drama, feel forced. The flat landscape of the Delta and its sudden electric storms provide a suitably gothic backdrop for the shocking denouement to come. The winner of Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for a novel "promoting social responsibility", Hillary Jordan is happily a writer who puts her duty to entertain first". Ron Charles in The Washington Post said Jordan "builds a compelling family tragedy, a confluence of romantic attraction and racial hatred that eventually falls like an avalanche. Indeed, the last third of the book is downright breathless. But, unfortunately, all of these narrators lack the essential quality of incompleteness. They're burdened with such thorough self-knowledge that the book has no room for dramatic irony. "What we cannot speak," Jamie thinks toward the end, "we say in silence," which is odd coming from a character who has already told us everything, including painful things we should have been allowed to infer. Jordan has plenty of talent to compose an engaging story, and when she tries to do less, she may very well end up doing more." Sequel Jordan is writing a sequel with the working title FATHERLANDS. In MUDBOUND, black American GI Ronsel Jackson has a love affair with a white German woman during the American occupation of Bavaria; when he ships out for home, neither know that she is pregnant. The new novel centers on their illegitimate son, Franz, who is raised in Germany