The cemetery of untold stories : a novel / Julia Alvarez.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

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. Agent: Stuart Bernstein, Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists. (Apr.)

Booklist Review

Alvarez (Afterlife, 2020) brings the magic again in this nesting box of a novel. Writer Alma, Alvarez's stand-in for a touch of autobiographical fiction, and her sisters Refuge, Consolation, and Pity, the English versions Alma often invokes for Amparo, Consuelo, and Piedad, have inherited property in the Dominican Republic. The sisters are not happy with Alma's decision to make over one of the parcels in the eponymous cemetery. She and her sculptor friend, Brava, haul boxes of her unfinished manuscripts there, and she buries the pages that won't burn, hoping to finally be free of them. As Alma and Brava transform the cemetery plot with statues and install a gate that opens only when a story is told, the surrounding neighborhood watches and wonders. Alma hires one of the neighbors to be the cemetery's caretaker, and the restless ghosts/statues tell sensitive Filomena their stories. These tales surround and crisscross each other as Filomena and her family; Alma's father, Dr. Manuel Cruz; and Bienvenida Inocencia, the discarded first wife of the brutal dictator Trujillo, are linked in surprising ways, most especially in a humanity that transcends pathos and passion. May Alvarez continue to excavate stories for many years to come!HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The best-selling Alvarez has a committed readership, and word of this inventive novel will also attract new followers.

Kirkus Book Review

When a novelist decides to retire, she builds a cemetery for the stories she has never finished telling. Alma Cruz has had a successful career as a novelist and professor. Upon retiring from academia, she vows she's done with writing as well. She wants most of all to return from the U.S. to her family's homeland, the Dominican Republic, and live quietly. But what to do with those boxes full of notes and manuscripts for the books she didn't get around to writing? Alma buys a plot of land in a working-class neighborhood in the Dominican Republic. Before she builds a casita to live in, she builds a cemetery for the stories. She burns the boxes--except for two that won't catch fire--and inters them all. One of the intact boxes holds notes for a book about Alma's enigmatic father, Dr. Manuel Cruz; the other is research for a book about Bienvenida Inocencia Ricardo, the forgotten first wife of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, a real-life monster who has haunted much of Alvarez's fiction. Alma hires a woman who lives nearby to guard and maintain the cemetery until she can move in. But Filomena will become indispensable, not just for her kindness and loyalty but because she can hear the stories Alma has buried. Filomena is illiterate, but when she sits in meditation at the books' graves, their subjects begin to speak to her. The novel's focus shifts away from Alma to the stories of her father and Bienvenida, and of Filomena herself. As those separate plots touch and interweave, a rich and moving saga of Dominican history emerges, embodied in the lives of irresistible characters. Alvarez returns to many of her familiar subjects: family and especially the relationships among sisters, immigrants' experiences, the empowerment of women. Her gifts for glowing prose and powerful narrative are still strong. Buried stories find their way to the light in this finely crafted novel. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.