Roy and Celestial are happily(ish) married for a year and a half. Suddenly everything falls apart, how they handle the fallout will come to define who they are as individuals and as a couple.
Author: Tayari Jones
Title: An American Marriage
Press: One World
Rating: 8
This was truly beautiful. It’s part prose part epistolary and the blend is something which i initially thought I would hate but actually… What the letter did which prose would never have achieved was keep the reader in the same darkness as the characters. What I liked most about it was how it warps the passage of time. Days, months and then years gallop by with next to no explanation of what has come to pass.
The pain in this novel is palpable from an individual and from a cultural standpoint. If you want to read this as a novel about marriage, love, friendship and heartbreak you probably could but the novel’s real strength, for me at least, lies in its unflinching racial commentary. There’s a subtlety in how Jones makes the reader see that this is what it is to be a black man in the United States and, even more expertly, what this means for black women.
Unsurprisingly I agree with Barack Obama on this one, “moving”.
Oh and since I finished reading it has won the Women’s Prize for fiction! ❤
Featured image: Photo by Git Stephen Gitau from Pexels
Second image: Photo by izhar khan from Pexels
Beth's Books (and other bits and bobs) 