It in, Jones brings us Aria, a survivor of family tragedy who is keeping an intimate secret from her devoted boyfriend and her best friend. Her follow-up, The Untelling, won the Lillian Smith Book Award in 2005. Set against the backdrop of the Atlanta child murders of 1979–1981, it won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. Jones’s first novel, Leaving Atlanta, is a coming-of-age novel that echoes a few key notes of the author’s upbringing. The Los Angeles Times notes that “Jones gives readers a sense of place in a deeply observed way” while The Village Voice said the author “is fast defining black middle-class Atlanta the way that Cheever did for Westchester.” In the tradition of writers from Flannery O’Connor to Jesmyn Ward, she evokes her setting as vividly as her characters. It has been published in over 20 countries, with over a million copies in print around the world.Ī native of Atlanta, Jones is drawn to thorny coming-of-age stories set in the New South. “It’s among Tayari’s many gifts that she can touch us soul to soul with her words.”Īn Oprah’s Book Club Selection, An American Marriage was named a notable book by The New York Times and The Washington Post and was included on Obama’s Best of 2018 roundup, in addition to being awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize), the Aspen Words Prize, and an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Fiction. And when his conviction is overturned five years later, both must navigate the unimaginable fallout of their enforced estrangement. When Roy is arrested and sentenced to 12 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, their lives implode. In this “moving portrayal of the effects of a wrongful conviction on a young African-American couple” (Barack Obama, on selecting the novel for his summer reading list), Jones introduces us to Celestial and Roy, a newlywed couple standing on the threshold of the American Dream. With her most recent novel, the instant New York Times bestseller An American Marriage, she “has emerged as one of the most important voices of her generation” ( Essence). Over the course of her award-winning career, Tayari Jones’s novels and essays have explored the vagaries of birth and fate, the bitterness of injustice, and the persistent power of love. I have always understood myself as having an obligation to stand on the side of the silenced, the oppressed, and the mistreated.” I grew up in a household that believed in social justice. I would be doing this even if I wasn’t a writer. “I don’t mind expressing my opinions and speaking out against injustice.

The Untelling by Tayari Jones