The Cemetery of Untold Stories

November 1, 2023

Multi-award-winning and best-selling Alvarez (Afterlife) pens a tale of magical realism about a writer and her stories. Alma Cruz returns to her homeland of the Dominican Republic and buries her untold stories, literally, but they have other ideas and take on lives of their own. With a 75K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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February 26, 2024
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.

Starred review from February 15, 2024
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.

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March 15, 2024
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.

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