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Literary icon Julia Alvarez, bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies shares an inventive and emotional novel about storytelling and her homeland of the Dominican Republic.
Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories, doesn't want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories—literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and revisions, and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her.
Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener as Alma's characters unspool their secret tales. Among them: Bienvenida, the abandoned second wife of dictator Rafael Trujillo, consigned to oblivion by history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.
The characters defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories.
Readers of Isabel Allende's Violeta and Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead will devour Alvarez's extraordinary new novel about beauty and authenticity, and will be reminded that the stories of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.
"Alvarez returns to many of her familiar subjects: family and especially the relationships among sisters, immigrants' experiences, the empowerment of women. Her gifts for glowing prose and powerful narrative are still strong. Buried stories find their way to the light in this finely crafted novel." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Alvarez brings the magic again in this nesting box of a novel...The best-selling Alvarez has a committed readership, and word of this inventive novel will also attract new followers." ―Booklist (starred review)
"[U]plifting...Alvarez seamlessly melds magical realism with heartfelt character portraits. This brims with the intoxicating power of storytelling." —Publishers Weekly
"Mystifying, compelling, and often wryly funny… Julia Alvarez delivers a lyrical, thought-provoking meditation on truth, complicated family narratives, and the question of whose stories get told." ―Shelf Awareness
"In this imaginative new novel from critically acclaimed literary icon Julia Alvarez, untold stories are buried in a graveyard and laid to rest … until the characters decide to revolt." ―Today.com
"This new novel from the legendary author of In the Time of Butterflies is about a writer who decides to literally bury all her unfinished stories in a plot of inherited land. But the words still speak to her, even from beyond their grave." ―Book Riot
"Julia Alvarez's The Cemetery of Untold Stories is a really innovative and unique tale about a writer who literally tries to bury her draft manuscripts but fails to stop them coming to life." ―BBC.com
This information about The Cemetery of Untold Stories was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Brandon Cruz González/EL VOCERO DE PUERTO RICO
Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960 at the age of ten. She is the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, three collections of poetry, and eleven books for children and young adults. She has taught and mentored writers in schools and communities across America and, until her retirement in 2016, was a writer in residence at Middlebury College. Her work has garnered wide recognition, including a Latina Leader Award in Literature from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature, the Woman of the Year by Latina magazine, and inclusion in the New York Public Library's program "The Hand of the Poet: Original Manuscripts by 100 Masters, from John Donne to Julia Alvarez." In the Time of the Butterflies, with ...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to Julia Alvarez's Website
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