Over the course of a 15-year career as a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, he’s recorded a series of acclaimed albums showcasing a balance of folk and contemporary roots, often drawing deeply on traditional songs and narrative heritage. As a popular live performer and an in-demand collaborator, Yorkston has toured continuously throughout the UK, Europe and North America, gaining a loyal and dedicated following.
At the Guardian Yorkston tagged ten top road novels, including:
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn WardRead about the other entries on the list.
This fine book, about a world I have little knowledge of, I read while touring one wet winter. It pulled me far from my then reality of skipping from one train toanother and placed me in a low-down American landscape of synthetic drugs, broken-family torment and brutal racism. There are plenty of ghosts in the book too, which I appreciate – ghosts of America’s (sometimes very recent) past, alongside more recognisable friends. They help frame and tell the tale of this dysfunctional family road trip to Mississippi State Penitentiary to visit the father who has been incarcerated.
Sing, Unburied Sing is among Stacey Swann's seven novels about very dysfunctional families, Una Mannion’s top ten books about children fending for themselves, Sahar Mustafah's seven novels about grieving a family member and LitHub's ten books we'll be reading in ten years.
--Marshal Zeringue