{ "item_title" : "The Cemetery of Untold Stories", "item_author" : [" Julia Alvarez "], "item_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.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/64/375/384/1643753843_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "28.00", "online_price" : "28.00", "our_price" : "28.00", "club_price" : "28.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "28.00" } }

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Julia Alvarez’s The Cemetery of Untold Stories is a powerful and lyrical allegory about an older artist haunted by her own creativity. Alma Cruz is a writer and professor based in Vermont and one of four daughters in a family from the Dominican Republic. Having witnessed a friend and fellow author driven to a mental institution and then to an early death by writerly frustration, Alma is guilt-ridden for resisting her friend’s pleas for help with her unfinished story, and, more than that, determined to avoid the same fate. In the aftermath of her father’s subsequent death, two things become clear. First, Alma herself will “soon be entering that territory of the old—okay, not old old, but the anteroom, no matter what the magazines said about seventy being the new fifty.” And second, aging isn’t just a matter of physical or cognitive decline; “aging also happens in the creative life.” And “there weren’t enough years left to tell all the stories she wanted to tell.” Seeking change and control, Alma quits her day job. But it’s not enough. The feeling of artistic aging, that she’s running out of time, won’t allow her any peace. The solution, Alma realizes, is to set herself free by exorcising the ghosts of her unfinished projects. Returning to the D.R., she decides to bury her failed manuscripts in the soil of her homeland, but rather than squashing them permanently, the rite gives her characters new life. The stories Alma buries grow like seeds. The remainder of the novel is focused on these tales. Alvarez has a wonderful way of being both lyrical and precisely concrete at the same time. The specificity of her writing is reflected in myriad ways on every page, and it’s not limited to the beauty of The Cemetery of Untold Stories’ central metaphor about storytelling. Two characters stand out: Papi, Alma’s father, a doctor turned dissident who hated talking about the past, and Bienvenida, a fictionalized version of the wife of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator who ruled the D.R. for 31 years. They have exile in common: “Bienvenida had been erased from history; Papi had sealed himself off . . . these were precisely the characters Alma felt drawn to. The silenced ones, their tongues cut off.” That brutal image is one indelible description among many. Magical and multifaceted, this meditation on creativity, culture and aging is a triumph.

Read our interview with Julia Alvarez on The Cemetery of Untold Stories.