The Cemetery of Untold Stories

Literary icon and great American novelist Julia Alvarez, bestselling author of
In the Time of the Butterflies and How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,
returns with a luminescent novel about storytelling that reads like an instant
classic.

"Only an alchemist as wise and sure as Alvarez could swirl the elements of
folklore and the flavor of magical realism around her modern prose and make it
all sing . . . Lively, joyous . . . often witty, occasionally somber and
elegiac." --Luis Alberto Urrea, The New York Times Book Review

"Engaging and written in a playful, crystal-clear prose, this novel explores
friendship, love, sisterhood, living between cultures, and how people can be
haunted by the things they don't finish . . . Entertaining . . .
Heartwarming." --Gabino Iglesias, The Boston Globe

**Named a Most Anticipated Book by the New York Times, Washington Post,
Today.com, Goodreads, B&N Reads, Literary Hub, HipLatina, BookPage, BBC.com,
Zibby Mag, and more**

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 whose
buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in
the everlasting vitality of stories. Julia Alvarez reminds us that the stories
of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.