2019 Political Fiction Book prize long list

An American Marriage

Tayari Jones

Published by: Oneworld

In An American Marriage Tayari Jones teases out the slow violence to romantic and familial relationships as the collateral damage from the antiBlackness of the American justice system meted out by the prison industrial complex. Love and obligation wax and wane as masterfully captured in a standout epistolary sequence drawn out over years of patience, frustration, and thwarted ambition. With great perceptiveness the novel attends to the overlaps and divergences between the dreams and desires of Black women and men as they struggle with their understandings of agency and consent.”