You are hereMeet the Author: June's #1 Indie Next Pick Tayari Jones

Meet the Author: June's #1 Indie Next Pick Tayari Jones

Start: 07/12/2011 6:30 pm

End: 07/12/2011 7:30 pm

jones author photo We are so pleased to welcome Tayari Jones, author of Silver Sparrow,to Maria's Bookshop for a signing. This is a book that reading groups will love!

Remarkably, as in Brady Udall's The Lonely Polygamist, the unconventional, morally troubling relationships at the core of Jones' Silver Sparrow illustrate nothing if not the universality of the human quest for acknowledgment, legitimacy, love and loyalty. As Chaurisse and her secret half-sister Dana move toward adulthood, they, like all of us, must shed idealistic notions of romantic and familial love to face difficult truths. A complex family drama, a richly crafted coming-of-age story and a meditation on the nature of love and forgiveness, Jones’ novel is a gripping highly readable, literary story with fleshy, likable, heartbreaking characters at its center.

With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, "My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist," author Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man's deception, a family's complicity, and two teenage girls caught in the middle.

Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon's two families-the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered. As Jones explores the backstories of her rich yet flawed characters-the father, the two mothers, the grandmother, and the uncle-she also reveals the joy, as well as the destruction, they brought to one another's lives.

At the heart of it all are the two lives at stake, and like the best writers-think Toni Morrison with The Bluest Eye--Jones portrays the fragility of these young girls with raw authenticity as they seek love, demand attention, and try to imagine themselves as women, just not as their mothers.