The Cemetery of Untold Stories
A Novel
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4.1 • 52 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Literary icon and great American novelist Julia Alvarez, bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, returns with a luminescent novel about storytelling that reads like an instant classic.
“Only an alchemist as wise and sure as Alvarez could swirl the elements of folklore and the flavor of magical realism around her modern prose and make it all sing . . . Lively, joyous . . . often witty, occasionally somber and elegiac.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, The New York Times Book Review
"Engaging and written in a playful, crystal-clear prose, this novel explores friendship, love, sisterhood, living between cultures, and how people can be haunted by the things they don’t finish . . . Entertaining . . . Heartwarming." —Gabino Iglesias, The Boston Globe
**Named a Most Anticipated Book by the New York Times, Washington Post, Today.com, Goodreads, B&N Reads, Literary Hub, HipLatina, BookPage, BBC.com, Zibby Mag, and more**
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 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 soon begin to defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener to the secret tales unspooled by Alma's characters. Among them, Bienvenida, dictator Rafael Trujillo's abandoned wife who was erased from the official history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.
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. Julia Alvarez reminds us that the stories of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Dominican-American novelist Julia Alvarez has occasionally flirted with magical realism throughout her career—but in The Cemetery of Untold Stories she takes it to Gabriel García Márquez levels, and the result is sublime. Best-selling novelist Alma Cruz has inherited a small piece of land in her native Dominican Republic that she neither wants nor needs. She decides to use it as a burial ground of sorts, the final resting place for the stories she could never finish. In this bucolic sanctuary, Alma’s abandoned characters, like the wife of a dictator and a revolutionary who fought against her husband, begin to live their own lives. Always a master of atmosphere, Alvarez has created a mysterious yet fully realized setting for a story that examines how we create our stories—and how they inevitably intertwine.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The uplifting latest from Alvarez (Afterlife) follows a 60-something author as she contends with the relationship between fiction and reality. After Alma Cruz's friend and fellow author dies unexpectedly, she's convinced the cause of death was the compulsion to write. That interpretation provokes Alma, who publishes under the pseudonym Scheherazade, to consider her own "many characters abandoned mid-narrative" in unfinished manuscripts and what would become of them if left unwritten. She also reflects on memories of her father's descriptions of an imaginary place called Alfa Calenda, which he invented as a boy to escape from his volatile father. After Alma inherits a rundown portion of her dad's estate, she has a dream that Scheherazade, who appears to her as an alter ego, wants her to "bury my abandoned drafts." She responds by building a cemetery for her manuscripts on the property and hiring a kind, middle-aged local woman named Filomena as groundskeeper. Various characters emerge from the buried manuscripts' pages and begin talking to their creator, including Bienvenida, whom Alma modeled after the wife of a Dominican dictator, and who sheds light on the fate of Filomena's long-lost nephew and his incarcerated mother. Throughout, Alvarez seamlessly melds magical realism with heartfelt character portraits. This brims with the intoxicating power of storytelling.
