Tayari Jones is the author of the novels Silver Sparrow, Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, andAn American Marriage, a New York TImes bestseller. Silver Sparrow was named a #1 Indie Next Pick by booksellers in 2011, and the NEA added it to its Big Read Library of classics in 2016. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, the Believer, the New York Times, and Callaloo. A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship, and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. She is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is an associate professor in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark University.
Connect
Sign up and keep informed of the latest on Tayari Jones and Blackstone Publishing
Praise for Books
“A love story…Full of perverse wisdom and proud
joy…Jones’ skill for wry understatement never wavers.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“Charting a vast emotional unknown is Tayari
Jones’ compelling third novel, Silver
Sparrow, in which a teenage girl’s coming of age in 1990s Atlanta is
shadowed by her dawning understanding of a corrosive secret—her father’s second
family.” —Vogue
“Tayari Jones’s immensely pleasurable new novel pulls off a minor miracle…Subtly exploring the power of labels…Jones crafts an affecting tale about things, big and small, we forfeit to forge a family. There are no winners in this empathetic and provocative story, only survivors.” —More
“Absorbing…Jones writes dialogue that is
realistic and sparkling, with an intuitive sense of how much to reveal and when.” —Washington Post
“[Jones] is fast defining middle-class black
Atlanta the way Cheever did Westchester.” —Village Voice
“Impossible to put down until you find out how
these sisters will discover their own versions of family.” —Los Angeles Times
“A tense, layered, and evocative tale…Jones
explores the rivalry and connection of siblings, the meaning of beauty, the
perils of young womanhood, the complexities of romantic relationships, and the
contemporary African-American experience.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“This is a heartbreaking story of two sisters,
unknown to each other at first, who find and love each other for a short time
in their lives.” —Oklahoman
“[An] expansive third novel…Jones effectively
blends the sisters’ varied, flawed perspectives as the characters struggle with
presumptions of family and the unwieldy binds of love and identity.” —Booklist
“Jones beautifully evokes Atlanta in the 1980s
while creating gritty, imperfect characters whose pain lingers in the reader’s
heart.” —Kirkus Reviews
With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, “My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist,” author Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man’s deception, a family’s complicity, and two teenage girls caught in the middle.
Set in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon’s two families—the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered.
As Jones explores the backstories of her rich yet flawed characters—the father, the two mothers, the grandmother, and the uncle—she reveals the joy, as well as the destruction, they brought to one another’s lives. At the heart of it all are the two lives at stake, and like the best writers—think Toni Morrison with The Bluest Eye—Jones portrays the fragility of these young girls with raw authenticity as they seek love, demand attention, and try to imagine themselves as women.