An American Marriage (Oprah’s Book Club) is a fiction novel. It is written by Tayari Jones. She is an American academic and writer. An American Marriage is her most prominent novel which was also part of Oprah’s Book Club Selection. She was also appreciated for her writing in Leaving Atlanta and as well as Silver Sparrow.
The audio narration of the subject title is done by Sean Crisden and Eisa Davis. The male narrator doing the female voicing was not a good idea and that didn’t go well with the listeners.
Celestial and Roy were the newlyweds and they were the embodiment of the American Dream and the New South. He was a young and promising executive while she was an artist who was quite close to making a big break in her career. But just as they both settled down with their regular life together, they both got ripped apart by circumstances that they couldn’t have imagined ever. Roy was arrested for a crime about Celestial didn’t know that he committed, and he was handed over 12 years in prison for that.
Celestial was fiercely independent and she found herself unmoored and bereft while taking a lot of comfort in her childhood friend, Andre. He was also the best man at her wedding. As the time passes in prison for Roy, she was unable to hold on to her love for him. Roy’s sentence after five years got overturned all of a sudden and he returned to Atlanta for starting together his life with Celestial once again. But things didn’t go as he had assumed…
The start of this book was a bit slow. Fortunately, the story picked up at the right time and as a whole, it was a good listen.