One of those circular, plotless books that slowly peels back another layer until you find yourself surprised that you’re still in your own house. Not a comfortable read by any means, with characters so well drawn that I felt desperate to fix things for them. Looks at the questions of right and wrong, racial injustice in America, what makes a marriage, love and forgiveness (and not in a happy-fluffy way)— you know, small issues.

A brilliant literary tale full of fantastic prose and very compelling. I loved the premise and would definitely recommend

An American Marriage is a powerful but slightly uneven look at a marriage which is thrown into chaos when the husband is convicted of a crime and sent to jail for 12 years.

Through letters written between the couple we learn their backstory and these enhance the veracity of the novel as a whole which is an overall satisfying read but can be frustrating in what is exlored and what isn't.

"An American Marriage" is an absolutely beautiful book that stays with you long after you've finished reading it. It's a love story but so much more, as it touches on contemporary issues such as racism and injustice. I loved it. Highly recommended.

A unique story about discrimination, and love in difficult and traumatic circumstances, beautifully and straight-forwardly told.

A rare thing, a novel that entirely deserves its plaudits and the surrounding hype. What can I add to what has already been said about this raw and powerful work? I do not use the word powerful lightly - this novel has immense power which it handles in such a human and heart wrenching manner that surely it is destined to become a classic. I was taken back and forth through the gamut of emotions so relentlessly that I was left exhausted. The characters are so perfectly drawn they were an absolute pleasure to read - so complex, so finely nuanced, so damn real! To detach from the emotive scenario to assess the quality of the writing is so difficult as it draws you in so completely and deeply that drawing yourself out the story to participate in real life is nigh on impossible! But I have to say there are a lot of things about this novel that correspond with my list of qualities that make a perfect novel. A stunning, suckerpunch of a novel. A must read. Highly recommended.

A stunning novel. This book follows the course of the marriage between Celestial and Roy after the horrific events of one night early in their relationship. The characters are real and throb with life on the page. This book covers huge subjects with sensitivity and without one word of cliche. I will remember this novel for a very long time, and will often think about Celestial and Roy and wonder....

Absolutely beautiful, powerful and heartbreaking storytelling. Loved the use of different voices, helped to empathise with our lead characters. A modern classic, highly recommend.

3.5

Such a mixed bundle of emotions from a very tragic tale. I didn't like Roy and Celeste as a couple to start with, they were very argumentative and for Roy it seemed more like his marriage was possession. Celeste was independent and strong, for her marriage was this thing that you did.

But then their whole lives get turned upside down because Roy is accused of rape. There is no question that he didn't do it.

Then there's Andre. He's loved Celeste since they were young. Now Roy is out of the picture him and Celeste grow closer.

But it's not just a love triangle, there are so many other people's lives who get caught up in a wrong conviction. I know that this is set in America but I can see reflections on our own system here plus from my own experiences being in a courtroom.

So many emotions in this book. The last few chapters were really hard to read but I felt like the ending was satisfactory, I really didn't like them as a couple. Also read the author's comments on Goodreads about this book, very insightful.

Roy and Celestial are a young professional black couple in Atlanta. Life looks good until Roy is falsely accused of rape and then convicted. An American Marriage follows their story before, during and after his sentence.

The novel takes on a huge issue – the mass incarceration of young black men through the failings of the US legal system, institutional racism and the legacy of slavery in the American South. But its genius is that it does so through a tight-knit cast of characters. We see Roy and Celestial mostly through their relationships to each other and their immediate friends and family.

Roy and Celestial are not archetypes but real, flawed people. The close observation brings a sense of claustrophobia but also an unforgiving eye to their complexities. You are left wondering where their relationship would have gone if this terrible event had not befallen them. You can understand what brings them together, but also the ways they might not be compatible.

The decisions Celestial takes when Roy is in prison are open to interpretation – is she doing the right thing, is she driven by the terrible situation she finds herself in, or do they reflect characteristics that were always there?

An American Marriage highlights class and gender and the way they cut across race. Celestial is from an affluent, educated, confident family and she is financially secure and able to provide for Roy in prison. He has gone to university but he is from a poor rural background. His parents were proud that he had been successful and escaped the fate of most young black men in their community but now he too is in prison.

Celestial feels that she has to make things up to Roy for what he has suffered, even though she is in no way responsible. As a woman, she is also victimised, by obligation, by guilt, by the need to make amends. She is made uncomfortable by the degrading experience of visiting, from the contemptuous looks of the staff to the intrusive strip searches. She also berates herself for not showing the ‘right’ emotions on the witness stand at his trial, for being articulate rather than in floods of tears, wondering if this might have swayed the jury.

The part of the novel where Roy is in prison is told only through the letters the couple exchange. At first I was dubious about this. Epistolary novels often feel artificial – who puts their true feelings on paper any more? But being in prison is one of the few times when people actually do, because it is their only option. It also enables us to see Roy and Celestial as they see each other, when their only other contact is through brief, strained visits. Later we learn what wasn’t in those letters.

This thought also led me to revise my view of the epilogue, which is also told in letters. Initially it felt the ending was too neat, but then it occurred to me that it may be naïve to take the letters at face value.

This is such a beautifully crafted book, taking in both the domestic and the political, individual pain and social injustice. It is a well deserved winner of the 2019 Women’s Prize for fiction.

A note on the audiobook

I listened to the audiobook which was perfect for the confessional, first-person narratives. It captured the contrasting voices – Roy charming and conversational, Celestial more brittle and reserved. More prosaically, I enjoyed their accents and the rhythm of the language – although I ‘hear’ the words when I read, they would probably have been more generically American in my head!

This book will stay with me for a long time after I finished reading it.Set in the American South,It's a heart rending but ultimately uplifting story of a young black couple ,Roy and Celestial,recently married and planning their life together.Their relationship is ,like most marriages, not perfect, but they have dreams and aspirations for their careers and hopes of children .All this changes when Roy is found guilty of a crime he didn't commit, and sentenced to twelve years in prison.
The story is told by both Roy and Celestial,and later by a third narrator Andre,The two main characters are sympathetically portrayed and I felt a real sense of sadness for them and all that they lost through something that wasn't their fault. As time passes,both characters change and develop perhaps not always as expected,but there is always a sense of the love they felt for each other which changes but is never lost.
It's a very satisfying read which ends on a hopeful note and is highly recommended.Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for an ARC in return for an honest review which reflects my own opinion.

Recently, An American Marriage won the Women’s Prize award. I had all of the shortlisted books but hadn’t made my way through them all. I decided to read An American Marriage after it had won and after having read some of the other fabulous shortlisted books you can see why this book managed to scoop the prize.

It is the story of Celestial and Ray. A newly married couple who are put through testing times when Ray is wrongly accused of a crime that he did not commit. It is about how marriage works, how individuals can struggle becoming a unit, and it is about the power of long lasting love.

I found myself having a very strong and negative reaction to the character Celestial. I disagreed with her choices and I found myself getting angry at her, believing her to be: petulant, spoilt and disagreeable. However, what is great about this story is that I believe that people coming from different backgrounds, different ages, and different marital status’ will all have different reactions. In my opinion, that is essentially what makes An American Marriage by Tayari Jones a great book.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones is available now.

For more information regarding Tayari Jones (@tayari) please visit www.tayarijones.com.

This book drew me in from the first page and held me captive all the way to the last word. That doesn't happen very often, but I just loved everything about this.

Roy and Celestial, newly-weds, full of hope for a long and happy future together, are suddenly thrust into a terrible, life-changing situation no-one could have foreseen. Torn apart they struggle to maintain the love they had, writing letters on an almost daily basis. Roy feels no different towards Celestial, but she struggles to hold on to it and eventually turns to her lifelong friend Andre for comfort and support. Whilst Roy's life now moves in a straight line, Celestial has turned her doll-making into a successful business.

Each of these three characters tells the story from their own perspective, and you can't help but feel sympathetic for each of them caught up in a nightmarish situation. The voices of Roy and Celestial and Andre are so real. The writing is sublime, the characters so believable. It's dramatic, funny, charming, heartbreaking... I'm running out of adjectives. I was sorry to get to the end of this as it's like saying Goodbye to three friends.

This is definitely one I'll go back to. Why have I not heard of this author before? A quick look on the internet shows she already has a couple of books to her name, so I must have a look at them.

My thanks to Netgalley for an ARC download.

This is an odd book to review. On the one hand, I enjoyed reading it but I found that it was only after I’d finished that I truly understood how great it was. I just couldn’t. Stop. Thinking. About. It. And every time I considered the novel from a new angle, I found a whole slew of other issues hiding behind it.

An American Marriage is the story of a married couple, Celestial and Roy, who become separated after Roy is convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. Roy goes to prison and Celestial is left to build a life on her own, with just the shadow of her husband looming in the background.

It’s the omnipresence of Roy in Celestial’s life that really gives the book some tension. Their marriage is always there in the background, overshadowing every move they both make. The issue of their legal union binds them together and creates all kinds of questions about freedom – it acts as a kind of metaphorical, socially driven prison of their own making. It really made me think about injustice and how punishment of an individual ripples out to affect the whole family.

There’s many things about the book that mean it shouldn’t work – the characters are unlikable, the plot isn’t particularly dynamic, the ending is a bit disappointing. However, there’s something about the writing that compels you to keep reading. I should have hated it but instead I loved it.

Essentially this story of a relationship and its aftermath is in two parts. The better (in my view) is in the first part where out lead characters are set up and then we flip back and forth between Roy and Celestial whilst he was prison. Less engaging for me is where the book becomes slightly more conventional as we follow their lives post prison. The emotions are raw and real but I felt myself drifting in and out of the story. There is, however, enough here of quality to make it a worthwhile read.

I wish I had loved this one. I mean, Obama loved it, so why couldn’t I?
But, whilst American Marriage explores the woeful over-representation of black men in the American prison system in a much-needed and timely way that manages to garner much insight into the presence of racial bias and unequal power structures, it unfortunately seems to waver when it focuses more on the aspects of the titular marriage itself.
This is primarily due to the degree to which Tayari Jones places Celestial and Roy firmly within the traditional, rigid (actually rather toxic) binaries of their gender identities. The marriage is seen, primarily through the viewpoint of Roy, although it remains unchallenged by either the narrative, the author or the characters around him, as a contract that allows him total possession and ownership of Celestial. Until death do them part and all that, but only if he wants to.
He was a chauvinistic, selfish, violent, bad tempered misogynist and his inclusion in a portrayal of a marriage that made a longlist like the Women's Prize, without him being kicked to the curb, defeated by Celestial, or her being made stronger by his absence, truly made for some truly puzzling reading.
This confusion on my part was further impounded by the double-standards giving to cheating and virginity, depending on which gender the ideas were applied to, and the fact that, the novel pauses in its polemic to randomly mention how the one gay character in all of its pages, died in the midst of the AIDs epidemic. I mean, talk about burying your gays. And, as if it couldn’t get anymore close-minded and frankly, rather Shakespearian, American Marriage effectively cumulates in a fist-fight over which of her two love interests gets Celestial, regardless of her own feelings on the matter. And honestly, at that point, all I wanted her to do was tell them both to fuck off and choose herself.

This is a landmark book. It's powerful and sweeping on the Black American experience, but it's also deep and personal and intimate when it comes to the characters involved. The story is told through three viewpoints and it works really well.

Interesting to read from alternating perspectives - this book really gets under the sheets of the emotional side of relationships. Enjoyed!

Deeply affecting, powerful book that makes me ashamed to recognise how very little we have moved forward to address racial inequality.

Newlywed couple Celestial and Roy are still learning what it is to be married when Roy is shockingly sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. Now, they must learn what marriage means when they're forced to lead separate lives.

Told through alternating first-person narrative, An American Marriage dissects what it is to be young, ambitious, American, married, black, in love, working, a parent. None of the characters are perfect - Celestial and Roy both have their selfish, cruel moments - and their flaws at times make them unlikable, but also deeply real and sympathetic.

Tayari Jones has an astonishingly beautiful way of describing the intangible and her characterizations are so potent it's hard to believe they're not real people. There was something so compelling about this book though not a lot really happens; you are driven to follow both protagonists on their journeys and see where, ultimately, they end up.