The Cemetery of Untold Stories

by Julia Alvarez

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643756066
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	04/02/2024
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960 at the age of ten. She is the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, three collections of poetry, and eleven books for children and young adults. She has taught and mentored writers in schools and communities across America and, until her retirement in 2016, was a writer in residence at Middlebury College. Her work has garnered wide recognition, including a Latina Leader Award in Literature from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature, the Woman of the Year by Latina magazine, and inclusion in the New York Public Library’s program “The Hand of the Poet: Original Manuscripts by 100 Masters, from John Donne to Julia Alvarez.” In the Time of the Butterflies, with over one million copies in print, was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its national Big Read program, and in 2013 President Obama awarded Alvarez the National Medal of Arts in recognition of her extraordinary storytelling. In 2024, she was profiled in the American Masters documentary, "Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined," on PBS. 

Hometown:

Middlebury, Vermont

Date of Birth:

March 27, 1950

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

B.A., Middlebury College, 1971; M.F.A., Syracuse University, 1975

Editorial Reviews

A captivating premise.”—BookPage, Most Anticipated Books of 2024

“Mesmerizing… Alvarez’s novel poignantly explores themes of storytelling, memory, and the resilience of narratives that refuse to be buried, emphasizing that our stories persist beyond our lifetimes.”—HispanicExecutive.com

“Read it if: You like your fantasy stories with a literary-fiction twist”—Fangirlish.com

“A Dominican author buries her unfinished manuscripts—but her characters are unwilling to go gently into that good night, in Julia Alvarez’s inventive latest.”—Vanity Fair, 11 Books to Read This Month

“The latest by literary legend Julia Alvarez… this imaginative book will make you think about legacies and how they live on.”—Real Simple, These Are the Best Books of 2024 (So Far)

“The confluence of many different viewpoints, and the fugue-like shifts among perspectives, give the Cemetery of Untold Stories a spellbinding breadth and historical range. Stylistically, Alvarez's writing is intricate and assured.”—Seven Days

“Alvarez is a masterful writer; there are many things to love in this book.”​—Portland Book Review

“One of the most prominent Latina voices in contemporary literature.”—Enlace Latino NC

“A graceful book about the stories that haunt us.”—Bookmarks

“Reads like the work of a seasoned writer coming to terms with her life and work—all its accomplishments and disappointments, hopes and resignations. There’s a wistful quality in the telling … anyone interested in the alchemy of storytelling would do well to look at this book.”—U.S. Catholic

“It’s a story that's both languorous and urgent... [Alvarez] continues her luminous virtuosity with the story of Alma Cruz. There is always something magical to discover in a story, and that is especially true in Alvarez's landing place.”—NPR.org

“Unforgettable. The central premise here — a graveyard for unfinished books — is delicious and sets off a novel full of people remembering and revising their own stories.” —USA Today

“Julia Alvarez’s recent novel is a well-wrought exploration of life, love, and what might happen to all those stories that remain untold at the end of a writer’s career . . . This is a complex and deeply engrossing work and one of Alvarez’s best.”—Brooklyn Rail

From the Publisher