An American Marriage
Tayari Jones, 2018
Contemporary fiction Literary fiction
A newly married couple's life is split open by circumstance, and the novel asks what marriage owes when the future they planned is no longer available. A tender, plainspoken voice carries you through love, family and loss at a steady, reflective pace.
Feels like tenderness and unease. About love, home and family.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy literary fiction about marriage, loyalty and the quiet textures of home, told in a tender voice. Its focus on loss and marital strain makes it a heavy read at times.
Why read it
Read it for a close, humane look at what marriage owes when plans collapse, and for prose that holds love and loss in plain, lyrical language.
A page from the book
What it costs to walk back into a house love has left.
Sometimes it’s exhausting for me to simply walk into the house. I try and calm myself, remember that I’ve lived alone before. Sleeping by myself didn’t kill me then and will not kill me now. But this what loss has taught me of love. Our house isn’t simply empty, our home has been emptied. Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it’s gone, nothing is whole again. Tayari Jones.An American Marriage was an Oprah's Book Club pick in 2018 and won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction.
Books that feel like this
Where to get it
Some of these links earn us a small commission, at no cost to you. It keeps BookFeed free.
Questions readers ask
- Is An American Marriage for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy literary fiction about marriage, loyalty and the quiet textures of home, told in a tender voice. Its focus on loss and marital strain makes it a heavy read at times.
- What is An American Marriage like?
- A tender, plainspoken voice carries you through love, family and loss at a steady, reflective pace. Feels like tenderness and unease. About love, home and family.
- What should I read after An American Marriage?
- If you liked An American Marriage, try Without Merit (Colleen Hoover), The Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison) and The Great Alone (Kristin Hannah).
A taste of the feed
What it feels like when the world stops holding you up.
I used to feel like i was on the top of the world. Then one day, i noticed that it felt like i was no longer on the top of the world. I was just floating around inside of it. And then eventually, it felt like the world was on top of me.
Without Merit · Colleen Hoover
What love reveals about the person doing the loving.
Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.
The Bluest Eye · Toni Morrison
The child who keeps the whole family from tipping over, and knows it.
Leni was afraid to stay and afraid to leave. It was strange—stupid, even—but she often felt like the only adult in her family, as if she were the ballast that kept the creaky Allbright boat on an even keel. Mama was engaged in a continual quest to “find” herself. In the past few years, she’d tried EST and the human potential movement, spiritual training, Unitarianism. Even Buddhism. She’d cycled through them all, cherry-picked pieces and bits. Mostly, Leni thought, Mama had come away with T-shirts and sayings. Things like, What is, is, and what isn’t, isn’t. None of it seemed to amount to much.
The Great Alone · Kristin Hannah
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
Keep reading in the feed