The Weight of Ash and Prayer

For readers of Beloved and Sing, Unburied, Sing, The Weight of Ash and Prayer is a Southern literary novel that echoes Faulkner’s ambition while centering women’s choices, silence, and survival.

Set in South Louisiana, the novel unfolds across two intertwined timelines. In 1862, Marie Clementine Broussard lives under the authority of land, church, and family expectation. As the Civil War narrows the futures available to women like her, Clementine makes a decision that is neither loud nor safe: she refuses the life arranged for her, even when that refusal costs her protection, reputation, and certainty. Her relationship with James Ashford—the son of a powerful planter—offers no rescue and no permission, only consequence. When war takes him, Clementine is left to carry what remains: land in her name, a child whose father will not be recorded, and a silence that functions not as submission, but as defense.

More than a century later, Sylvie Broussard begins researching her family history and uncovers a pattern of omission—parish records altered, names struck through, women preserved only as shadows in other people’s stories. What begins as research becomes reckoning. As Sylvie traces what was left behind—letters, land deeds, a pearl ring, a vanished woman—her discoveries unsettle her present life, revealing how inherited silence continues to shape intimacy, identity, and belonging.

Told through braided timelines, shifting perspectives, and interwoven archival material, The Weight of Ash and Prayer resists easy resolution. It is a novel about constrained autonomy, belated understanding, and the quiet decisions that echo across generations.

This is not a novel of redemption.
It is a novel of endurance.

What survives when silence outlives the people who were forced to carry it?