“It’s among Tayari’s many gifts that she can touch us soul to soul with her words.”
—Oprah Winfrey
“Haunting . . . Beautifully written.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Available wherever books and ebooks are sold
A New York Times bestseller, an Oprah's Book Club selection, and a Barack Obama recommendation, An American Marriage is the book everyone is talking about!
A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book
Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction
“BRILLIANT and heartbreaking . . . Unforgettable.”
“TRANSCENDENT . . . Triumphant . . . Gorgeous.”
“ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT VOICES of her generation.”
“POWERFUL . . . Both sweeping and intimate.”
A 2018 Best of the Year selection of NPR ● TIME ● BUSTLE ● O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE ● THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
“A TENSE AND TIMELY love story . . . Packed with brave questions about race and class.”
“An American Marriage is that rare treasure . . . A GRIPPING, MASTERFULLY CRAFTED message in a bottle.”
“SEARING . . . ESSENTIAL.”
“A stunning epic love story.”
“Timely, thoughtful, and BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN . . . A gem of a book.”
“HEARTBREAKING AND GENUINELY SUSPENSEFUL. Complex and important.”
“COMPELLING.”
“A literary page-turner that’s IMPOSSIBLE TO PUT DOWN.”
“HOLDS THE READER FROM THE FIRST PAGE TO LAST, with her compassionate observation, her clear-eyed insight and her beautifully written and complex characters.”
“Tayari Jones is blessed with vision to see through to the SURPRISING AND DEVASTATING truths at the heart of ordinary lives.”
“Subtle, well-crafted, and powerful . . . This is, at its heart, a love story, but a love story warped by racial injustice. And, in it, Jones suggests that racial injustice haunts the African-American story.”
“Jones crafts an affecting tale that explores marriage, family, regret, and other feelings made all the more resonant by her well-drawn characters and their intricate conflicts of heart and mind.”
“Tayari Jones provides an essential contemporary portrait of a marriage in this searing novel. An American Marriage gorgeously evokes the New South as it explores mass incarceration on a personal level."
“A tense and timely love story. Told in letters and from alternating perspectives, packed with brave questions about race and class, An American Marriage is the perfect book-club book – one the whole group will finish and discuss with conviction.”
“Compelling… spun with tender patience by Jones, who cradles each of these characters in a story that pulls our sympathies in different directions. She never ignores their flaws, their perfectly human tendency toward self-justification, but she also captures their longing to be kind, to be just, to somehow behave well despite the contradictory desires of the heart.”
“Utterly gripping novel . . . This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control.”
"Novelist Jones writes brilliantly about expectations and loss and racial injustice, and how love must evolve when our best laid plans go awry."
“Nuanced and evocative . . . An American Marriage is a compelling exploration of the thorny conflicts that drive us apart and bind us, the distorting weight of racism, and how commitment looks across time – and generations.”
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in her childhood friend Andre, who was the best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.
This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward, with hope and pain, into the future.
