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An American Marriage: WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION, 2019
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An American Marriage: WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION, 2019
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An American Marriage: WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION, 2019
Ebook360 pages6 hours

An American Marriage: WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION, 2019

By Tayari Jones

3/5

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About this ebook

WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION, 2019

LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION, 2019

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD

'A moving portrayal of the effects of a wrongful conviction on a young African-American couple.' - Barack Obama

A Book of the Year according the i, Guardian, Sunday Times, Sunday Mail

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of the American Dream. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. Until one day 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.

Devastated and unmoored, Celestial finds herself struggling to hold on to the love that has been her centre, taking comfort in Andre, their closest friend. When Roy's conviction is suddenly overturned, he returns home ready to resume their life together.

A masterpiece of storytelling, An American Marriage offers a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three unforgettable characters who are at once bound together and separated by forces beyond their control.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherOneworld Publications
Release dateMar 19, 2018
ISBN9781786075178
Unavailable
An American Marriage: WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION, 2019

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Reviews for An American Marriage

3/5

1,190 ratings138 reviews

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  • 3/5
    Not my kind of novel. Didn’t like the writing very much, the format seemed gimmicky (chapters alternating with different people’s viewpoints), and the story with lots of twists and turns seemed pretty soapy. I feel bad saying this, after all I can’t write at all, I couldn’t match the quality of even one page of that book, let alone the whole thing. I’m sure a lot of people would like it and find it meaningful and thought-provoking. Just not my kind of novel, is all.
  • 5/5
    An amazing work of fiction.

    The author really managed to get us to feel all the feelings the characters were feeling and that was why I found it so hard to put down.
  • 4/5
    This is the story of Celestial and Roy. They are young newlyweds when they take a trip to visit Roy’s parents. Roy is mistakenly arrested for the rape of a woman, and while he is in jail, his marriage to Celestial falls apart. This is a heartbreaking story. It leads you to ask, “what is love, what is a marriage?” Beautifully written.

    #AnAmerican Marriage #TayariJones
  • 5/5
    Beautifully written and morally complex, I enjoyed both reading this book and thinking about it when I wasn't reading it. I thought the dialogue captured Atlanta well, too.
  • 4/5
    Woah. That was so heavy. I keep just repeating ‘woah’ in my head. I am a little bit teary-eyed now. Despite the hefty subject matter, I read this in two days. I’m just sitting here trying to find words to make a sentence that makes sense about how this book has me feeling. Woah will do.
  • 3/5
    Ended up skimming the middle section because I didn't really care for the characters and didn't feel I was getting to know them very well. Also their voices were all pretty much the same. The best part was the letters between them.
  • 5/5
    As this novel started, I couldn't really get into it. But, the more I read, the complexities of the relationships and the reality of marriage began to emerge. Overall, I really liked this book; very insightful and socially relevant on several levels. Highly recommended.
  • 4/5
    Story of Celeste and Roy newlyweds. Roy gets arrested and railroaded for a crime he did not commit. Celeste stands by his side for as long as she can while they try to get him out of prison but it just becomes too long of a wait. It was tragic and I felt very sad for both of them.
  • 5/5
    It took a while for me to get to this and it was worth the wait. Precise and beautiful characterization. The themes are complex and important. Wonderful imagery.
  • 4/5
    Excellent book recommended to me from many sources. I hadn't wanted to read it because it seemed to be about a troubled marriage and I wasn't up for that. But then I heard such great things about it, and I also wanted to increase my reading (and purchase) of books by black authors, so it only made sense to get a copy. Am so glad I did. Pandemic read.
  • 5/5
    Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are just starting their lives together when he is falsely accused and convicted of rape and sent to prison. That is not the subject of the novel; rather it sets the plot in motion as the novel explores issues of race and class, and as Celestial and Roy’s apparently solid but infant marriage breaks down. Beautifully written and absorbing.
  • 3/5
    diverse fiction, human drama (audiobook)
    portrait of a marriage between a well-off Black woman and her relatively poorer entrepreneurial Black husband, through some pretty rocky times (incarceration for a rape he didn't commit being just the start).
    Tayari Jones always creates these complex characters with complex stories, and this book is no exception. Well done, and an interesting book club choice, too.
  • 5/5
    I could not put this one down once I started reading. Complex characters that you couldn't help but care about.
  • 5/5
    This book was fantastic, and definitely worth all of the reviews. I really enjoyed the characters, and how unpredictable the story was, there were so many twists and turns, none of which I saw coming even to the end.
  • 5/5
    Loved it! I was drawn in from the first few pages. Told in a homespun yet elegant way this novel attempts to capture the plight of the black man and "American" marriages. This novel evoked so many emotions and was a quick, yet thought provoking read. I think this novel would be particularly good for book clubs as it deals with numerous topics that might facilitate dialogue. #teamroy

    Go read it!
  • 4/5
    I was afraid of this book - the rage and sadness that would come with reading the story of yet another wrongly accused black man. Instead it was a remarkably sweet, intimate story. Still sad and frustrating themes, but humanized in a way that made it enjoyable.
  • 5/5
    One of the best book I've ever read. It's a deep reflection on marriage or unions in general and how much both parties have to compromise to make it last forever and ever.
    In today's society where everyone is instant gratification and tinder, who's willing to put the afford?
  • 3/5
    I hate the ending to be honest. I found the book a little boring, however, some parts were a bit interesting.
  • 4/5
    For a book that has received so much praise what stuns me most is that the pain we carry can spill over and hurt the ones we love the most.
  • 5/5
    Amazing read!!!
    I could not keep it down once I started
  • 4/5
    Another really good book. This is about two people: Celestial and Roy - young, black, educated, hip - and how Roy's conviction for a crime he didn't commit affects their marriage. The book's chapters alternate among three voices: Celestial's, Roy's, and Andre's. Andre is Celestial's childhood friend and neighbor. It's a book about many things: what it means to be in a marriage, what family means, how one's background imprints itself on who you are, how incarceration affects the person imprisoned and the people on the outside who are connected to the prisoner. I found it absolutely fascinating, and really want to discuss it with others.
  • 5/5
    an incredibly moving novel and one of the best I've read in the past year. Jones writes men better than most men.
  • 4/5
    A novel about the intertwining lives of 3 African-American people. The story is told in first- person from the point of view of each character; Roy, Celestial, and Celestial's childhood friend, Andre. It touches on unfair characterizations of both Black men and women from both a legal and inter-cultural perspective. Roy and Celestial have been married for only 1 1/2 years when Roy is wrongly accused of rape when at a hotel. Roy and Celestial write to each other for years but Celestial's life becomes entrenched with her new business and her childhood friend who has always loved her. Roy is incarcerated for 5 years and is finally released after a relentless lawyer proves his innocence. Roy returns home to find his life in shreds. Roy's strong bonds to his father and mother help hold him together but his need for his wife is tearing him apart. Very well told and I enjoyed this novel.
  • 4/5
    Fascinating and complex look at a marriage and how situations beyond one’s control can alter the landscape of one’s life. This is a novel of a young marriage that is rent assunder by a wrongful conviction. Jones does not really dwell on this part of the story itself, the crime, the arrest, and the trial, but that makes it no less powerful a presence in the story. The author seems to be more interested in the consequences, in the way damage ripples out and changes lives.In one sense, the fact that Jones only spends five pages on the trial itself is a strength. The reader is informed that Roy is innocent, his family know he is innocent. In fact it seems the entire black community in which he grew up knows he is innocent. What is powerfully shocking to this reader, and it should be to any white American reader, is how matter-of-factly this situation is seen by Roy’s family and community. They fight, but they also realize that there is only so much they can do, and this is the double tragedy here. This is a story of relationship and tragedy, of strength and love and the limits of both. But it is also truly a story of an American marriage, even if it is a marriage I could not have conceived of from my protected white vantage point. The fact is that far too many black men are convicted out of fear and prejudice than science and evidence, the facts are that a black family’s view of what it is to be American, if this book is any reflection of the reality, and I do not doubt that, is entirely different from the view of America I grew up with. The fact is that prejudice, and tragedy, and wrongful conviction rend the fabric of families and society.A story of a marriage under stress yes. A story of the complexities of human emotion, strength, and human bonds yes. But there is so much here, and the novel is strengthened as much by what it does not say as by what it does. Jones is a master at creating three unique voices, at telling a complex tale by interweaving stories, and letting us see the whole through the web of the parts. Highly recommended.
  • 4/5
    An American Marriage by Tayari Jones was a fine book. Sweeping in its scope, the book tells the story of Celestial and Roy. They are southern, black, well-educated, hard-working, and prosperous. They have risen above their ancestry of sharecropping and poverty and are proud of where they are going, or would be if it were not for their marriage problems. Roy is what he likes to call "a ladies man", which is a polite way of saying he cheats on Celestial. Their arguments have begun to include talk of divorce, but Roy knows exactly how to charm his way back into his scorned wife's affections.Then it happens. An elderly woman is raped, and she points the finger at Roy. The eye of the court looks discriminately at black defendants, and packs him off to prison for twelve years. Roy's life and his marriage dissolve like salt in a glass of Roy's mama's iced tea.An American Marriage was a gripping read. It was - to my delight - epistolary for part of the book. Roy and Celestial and Andre, the other side of this triangle, are so keenly drawn that you can see their faces, hear their voices, know their hearts.And yet.I didn't like the way the book ended, and that's all I'm going to say about that for fear of spoilers. I didn't like the fact that I couldn't understand all the imagery. There was something important about a pear Roy once ate in prison, but I could never figure it out, although the image recurred throughout the novel. And this part pains me - I don't think I could ever comprehend the book fully because the book is about black American families and black American lives, and I fit in neither of those categories. Because of that, some parts of the book that might be plain to others are lost to this WASP-y lady in Canada.However much I did and didn't understand, this was a masterful novel, and I am really glad to have read it and been privileged to meet the people within its pages.
  • 3/5
    This was the story about a man who gets sent to prision for a crime he did not commit. His wife ends up falling in love with his best friend while he is in jail. Should she remain faithful to him? Is it reasonable for her to move on? It is a complicated story that was well written in some parts and slow in others.
  • 4/5
    Book on CD performed by Sean Crisden and Eisa Davis.. A young couple are on their way to success and, just over a year into their marriage, contemplating beginning a family, when the unforeseeable happens. Torn apart by racial injustice, they struggle to maintain the promise of their relationship.I think it would be a great choice for a book-club. There are so many issues to discuss: Can America tolerate an upwardly mobile African American couple? How do parental expectations influence our adult selves? Is a personal goal more important than a shared dream? Is it reasonable to expect a seemingly strong relationship to survive a forced separation of several years? What’s the meaning of “faithful”? Is an omission a lie? This is a marvelous character-driven study of relationships, in the broader context of modern society’s inability to grant a Black man the basic premise of “innocent until proven guilty.” Despite this great injustice, the central focus is really the characters’ lack of communication and honesty with one another. I admit my loyalties waivered between Celestial and Roy, though ultimately, I think I’m in Roy’s camp. The person I didn’t understand or sympathize with at all was Andre. I liked that Jones gave us two sets of parents who were dedicated to one another, and to their children. And that she introduced the “biological” vs “actual” parent dichotomy.The audiobook is performed by two talented voice artists: Sean Crisden and Eisa Davis. This made it easy to follow the changing points of view, though I thought there should have been a third narrator for Andre’s chapters.
  • 3/5
    I saw Tayari Jones at the Cheltenham Literary Festival held on board the Queen Mary 2 this past November. She impressed me as the smartest person on stage in the three or so panel discussions she appeared in so I looked forward to reading this book. I am afraid I have to report being disappointed. There are a few serious flaws: Dre was a very flat character. He was there not because of who he is as a person, but because he served as a plot mechanism. Too often you can see Ms. Jones thinking about what to do next with the characters and the plot, and that defeats the purpose of writing a novel. The reader should never see the author's hand. This is especially true with the ending where everyone gets their life wrapped up nicely. It's Hallmark stuff and beneath someone of Jones's intelligence. I have never written a review this harsh, and it saddens me that I feel compelled to do it now.
  • 3/5
    This tragic tale is compelling but not easy to read. Husband Roy is accused and sentenced to prison for 12 years for a crime he didn’t commit. Wife Celestial is left to pick up the shattered pieces of their life. Roy is released after 5 years, but it is too late to salvage what they once had. But even before he was arrested, their life together wasn’t ideal. This book contained too much sadness, too much upheaval, and too many bad happenings for my taste. The writing flowed well, and the characters were well developed, but most were not that likable. I did like the author’s writing, but not her storyline. The good thing she brought to light is the injustice in the justice system.
  • 3/5
    I liked it, but it was on the tragic side. Easy read. I liked that (on the edition I read) the narrator of each section was listed at the top... or I could have gotten confused lol.