Praise for THE UNTELLING by Tayari Jones:
"THE UNTELLING is a story of deep hurt and slow realization, injury and recovery, and the way people genuinely change their lives. I love it."
-- Dorothy Allison, author of BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA
"Tayari Jones is one of the finest writers of her generation."
-- Pearl Cleage, author of BABYLON SISTERS
"No sophomore jitters here. No timidity. Just a strong wind swirling the truth, hoping for love, daring the reader to inhale the forgiveness."
-- Nikki Giovanni, author of SPIN A SOFT BLACK SONG
Tayari Jones was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia where she spent most of her childhood with the exception of the one year she and her family spent in Nigeria, West Africa. Although she has not lived in her hometown for over a decade, much of her writing centers on the urban south. Although I now live in the northeast, she explains, my imagination lives in Atlanta.
Her first novel, Leaving Atlanta , is a coming of age story set during the citys infamous child murders of 1979-81. Jones herself was in the fifth grade when thirty African American children were murdered from the neighborhoods near her home and school. When asked why she chose this subject matter for her first novel, she says, "This novel is my way of documenting a particular moment in history. It is a love letter to my generation and also an effort to remember my own childhood. To remind myself and my readers what it was like to been eleven and at the mercy of the world. And despite the obvious darkness of the time period, I also wanted to remember all that is sweet about girlhood, to recall all the moments that make a person smile and feel optimistic."
Leaving Atlanta received many awards and accolades including the Hurston/Wright Award for Debut Fiction. It was named Novel of the Year by Atlanta Magazine, Best Southern Novel of the Year, by Creative Loafing Atlanta. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Washington Post both listed it as one of the best of 2002.
Her second novel, The Untelling , published in 2005, is the story of a family struggling to overcome to aftermath of a fatal car accident. When asked by she chose to focus on a particular family in this work after the sprawling historical subject matter of Leaving Atlanta, Tayari Jones explains, "The Untelling is a novel about personal history and individual and familial myth-making. These personal stories are what come together to determine the story of a community, the unoffical history of a neighborhood, of a city, of a nation." Upon the publication of The Untelling, Essence magazine called Jones, "a writer to watch." The Atlanta Journal Constitution proclaims Jones to be "one of the best writers of her generation." In 2005, The Southern Regional council and the University of Georgia Libraries awarded The Untelling with the Lillian C. Smith Award for New Voices.
The Untelling paints a vivid, unforgettable portrait of a woman seeking to overcome the trauma of her past. When Ariadne Jackson was nine, a car accident killed her father and baby sister, forever destroying her familys secure middle-class life. The tragedy left her elegant mother, her rebellious sister, and Aria herself wounded by grief, rage, and guilt. Caught between her mothers bitter dissatisfaction and her sisters efforts to distance herself from the family altogether, Aria grew up alone, despite sharing a crowded home with her mother and sister.
At age twenty-five, Aria has created a meaningful life for herself, living in a not-quite gentrified inner-city neighborhood, teaching literacy to teenaged girls. For the first time in her life, she has both a best girlfriend in whom she can confide and a boyfriend who offers her love and respect.
When Aria discovers she may be pregnant, she is seduced by the promise of family, the lure of a normal life, and the dream of a fresh start. Then everything changes in ways she never anticipated. As she mediates between her past and her altered reality, she unearths secrets about family and friends and searches for the courage to divulge one heartbreaking revelation about herself.
Poignant, evocative, and luminously insightful, The Untelling speaks of the truths we hide even from ourselves, the circumstances that can either undermine or restore us, and the transformative power of examining all that we keep untold.
Tayari Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, The University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. Currently, she is the Jenny McKean Moore Writer in Residence at George Washington University. Starting in the fall of 2007, she will be an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, Newark campus. For Tayari's blog and more, please visit tayarijones.com .
Related:
Preview Chapter One of The Untelling online .
Request a FREE limited edition button , created especially for The Untelling's Spring 2006 paperback launch party in Washington, D.C.
