Jones surrounds these unhappy women with other well-drawn characters. Also, like her mother (who was holding baby Genevieve on her lap during the car accident), Ariadne carries an unwarranted but overpowering burden of guilt: she blames herself for refusing to comfort her father during his last moments of life. This problem has especially sad consequences for her relationship with her boyfriend Dwayne. Ariadne's father died when she was on the brink of puberty, and it seems that her very womanhood has been compromised. Hermione has married her father's best friend and her relations with her stepdaughter, a woman who's older than she is, are icy. Eloise's quirkiness she chose her daughters' names can turn mean she can bake BB's into cornbread, or capriciously lock her daughters out of the house.

The damage sometimes manifests in roundabout ways.

Ariadne, her mother Eloise and older sister Hermione survived, physically unscarred, but psychologically mangled. When Ariadne Jackson was around 10 years old, her father and younger sister Genevieve were killed in a car crash that Jones describes with quiet, matter-of-fact horror. Her new novel, The Untelling, though focused on one family, tells a story no less wrung with grief. 'Tayari Jones is a wonderful storyteller.Tayari Jones' first novel, Leaving Atlanta, dealt with the sorrow and horror of the Atlanta Child Murders of the early 1980s. 'Tayari Jones is a wonderful storyteller.' - Ploughshares 'Tayari Jones has emerged as one of the most important voices of her generation.' - Essence 'Tayari Jones is blessed with vision to see through to the surprising and devastating truths at the heart of ordinary lives, strength to wrest those truths free, and a gift of language to lay it all out, compelling and clear.' - Michael Chabon The truth is about to make her question her every assumption and reevaluate the life she has worked so hard to build for herself.as it sends her reeling in a direction she had no idea she was destined to go.

And although relations with her remaining family are strained, she's done her best to establish a solid, normal life for herself, living in Atlanta and teaching literacy to girls who have fallen on hard times.īut now she has a secret that she's not yet ready to share with Dwayne, her devoted boyfriend, or Rochelle, her roommate and best friend: Aria is pregnant. From the author of the Oprah Book Club Selection An American Marriage, here is an emotionally powerful novel that 'succeeds uly a wonderful story' (Boston Globe).Īria is no stranger to tragedy - as a young girl, she and her older sister and mother survived a car crash that took the lives of their father and beloved baby sister.

The Untelling by Tayari Jones