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    The Cemetery of Untold Stories
    The Cemetery of Untold Stories
    The Cemetery of Untold Stories
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Cemetery of Untold Stories

    Written by Julia Alvarez

    Narrated by Alma Cuervo

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Literary icon Julia Alvarez, the international bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, returns with a luminescent novel about storytelling that reads like 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 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 soon begin to defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener to the secret tales unspooled by Alma’s characters. Among them, Bienvenida, dictator Rafael Trujillo’s abandoned wife who was erased from the official history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.

    The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and who's buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories. Julia Alvarez reminds us that the narratives of ourlives are never truly finished, even at the end.

    “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

    Editor's Note

    Stories demand to be told…

    In another captivating tale by Alvarez (“How the García Girls Lost Their Accents”), Alma Cruz retires after a long writing career and returns to her homeland in the Dominican Republic. She creates a graveyard to bury and honor her unpublished manuscripts, but the characters therein aren’t ready to be silenced. Weaving magical realism into a family and historical saga, Alvarez demonstrates how stories endure — even the ones that go untold.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateApr 2, 2024
    ISBN9798891780637
    The Cemetery of Untold Stories
    Author

    Julia Alvarez

    Julia Alvarez is the author numerous bestselling and award-winning novels including How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of Butterflies, collections of poems, and works of nonfiction as well as picture books. She has won the Pura Belpré Award, the Américas Award, the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature, and the National Medal of Arts.

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    Reviews for The Cemetery of Untold Stories

    4.5/5

    33 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      It expressed reverence for writing, and for transcendence through art, in original ways. The characters, with all their flaws and strengths, are drawn with honesty and humanity. The narration is entrancing.
    • 4/5
      I couldn’t get into it at the beginning. I almost gave up but I kept going, and I am so glad that I did. I quite liked it. Very interesting plot and weaving together of different stories. Very meta.