An American Marriage

A raw, realistic character study of two newlyweds dealing with a total fate shitpie, and the emotional damage it wreaks on their life, and of course, love. Beautiful prose smattered with wisdom.

Zoe Foster Blake

Brilliant ... Tackling the big issues – prejudice, injustice, loyalty, love, loss – this is a haunting and compelling book.

Sydney Morning Herald

among the first great literary works to arise from the Black Lives Matter movement.

Tin House

Powerful . . . both sweeping and intimate - at once an unsparing exploration of what it means to be black in America and a remarkably lifelike portrait of a marriage.

The New Yorker

Compelling

Washington Post

This novel redefines the traditional American love story.

Oprah

a whirlpool of race, resilience, and rich writing

Vanity Fair

Subtle, well-crafted, and powerful.

Huffpost

one of 2018’s best novels

Elle

Exquisite

Bustle

Tayari Jones understands love and loss and writes with passion and precision about the forces that move us all from one to another.

Amy Bloom

a compelling exploration of the thorny conflicts that drive us apart and bind us, the distorting weight of racism, and how commitment looks across time – and generations.

BBC Culture

Jones writes brilliantly about expectations and loss and racial injustice, and how love must evolve when our best laid plans go awry.

Esquire

Jones crafts an affecting tale that explores marriage, family, regret, and other feelings made all the more resonant by her well-drawn characters and their intricate conflicts of heart and mind.

Booklist

I love An American Marriage, and I’m so excited for this book to be in the world. Tayari’s novel is timely, thoughtful, and beautifully written. Reading it, I found myself angry as hell, laughing out loud, choking up and cheering. A gem of a book.

Jacqueline Woodson

Jones uses her love triangle to explore simmering class tensions and reverberating racial injustice in the contemporary South, while also delivering a satisfying romantic drama.

Publishers' Weekly

Jones is a master with words and An American Marriage is the wordsmith at the top of her game.

Bitch Media

Tayari Jones provides an essential contemporary portrait of a marriage in this searing novel. An American Marriage gorgeously evokes the New South as it explores mass incarceration on a personal level.

EW

a challenging, important and fascinating read

AM New York

An American Marriage is Tayari Jones’s extraordinary fourth novel, a page-turning love story with a powerful political undercurrent. It’s as much a novel about family and race, expectation and desire, loneliness and loyalty as it is a story about how readily the American Dream can be derailed on the basis of skin color.

Barnes and Noble

thoroughly engrossing and impressive novel

Alex Clark, The Guardian

American Marriage by Tayari Jones is an exploration of race-based injustices within the American judicial system, but, as the title suggests, it is also a book about marriage. Mature, elegantly told, and deeply affecting. I learned what it was to be accused of something I did not do, and to suffer the consequences. I was outraged. Then to make meaning from these consequences, to forge a life. I enjoyed this book immensely, and felt it taking me to a place I hadn't known before, in the way the best fiction can. It was so impressive.

Sofie Laguna, Australian Financial Review