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The Cemetery of Untold Stories
- Narrated by: Alma Cuervo
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Literary icon Julia Alvarez returns with an inventive and emotional novel about storytelling itself that will be an instant classic.
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 revisions, 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 the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener as Alma’s characters unspool their secret tales. Among them: Bienvenida, the abandoned second wife of dictator Rafael Trujillo, consigned to oblivion by history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.
The characters defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. 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.
Listeners of Isabel Allende’s Violeta and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead will devour Alvarez’s extraordinary new novel about beauty and authenticity that reminds us the stories of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.
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What the critics say
“Thought-provoking and powerful, The Cemetery of Untold Stories is a balancing act of the everyday and the magical, a blend of history and cuento. Through imperfect characters longing for love and fighting against el olvido, we are reminded that stories have the power to bring us together.”—Jaquira Díaz, author of Ordinary Girl
Editorial Review
What listeners say about The Cemetery of Untold Stories
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Joan M
- 2024-08-16
Creative and fresh
I was tiredof tge same old same old tgat comes up once your devise thinks it knows you. Took a path away from the usual an cound this wonderful narative unlike any thing I havevread before. I loved the unfolding of family tales over generations with a novel "suppose" that tiesthem together. will look for more by this author
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