Her themes of legitimacy and secrets play out with symphonic, seemingly effortless resonance, and her indelible characters-one daughter a secret, discovered by the other-redefine love, loyalty, and betrayal in a New South only generations removed from slavery’s fracture. “Sharp as a blade, gleaming with ‘sense’ and humor. Impossible to put down until you find out how these sisters will discover their own versions of family.” Los Angeles Times

But more than that, Jones has created in her main characters tour guides of that region: honest, hurt, observant and compelling young women whose voices cannot be ignored. “Tayari Jones has taken Atlanta for her literary terroir, and like many of our finest novelists, she gives readers a sense of place in a deeply observed way. SlateĪn exciting read all the way through. It’s one of those ‘just one more chapter’ kinds of books that require much last-minute changing of plans, because real life feels far less amusing, appalling, shocking, and loving than the world of its characters. Tayari Jones has written a novel filled with characters I’ll never forget. Silver Sparrow will break your heart before you even know it. Oprah MagazineĬharting a vast emotional unknown is Tayari Jones’s compelling third novel, Silver Sparrow, in which a teenage girl’s coming of age in 1980s Atlanta is shadowed by her dawning understanding of a corrosive secret - her father’s second family. Jones’s skill for wry understatement never wavers. It is amazing to watch, time and time again in this book, how Jones reveals the ways in which family both creates and destroys our identity. In Silver Sparrow-an amazing novel about a man with two families, one hidden and one public-Jones does something breathtaking and difficult: She renders a unique family dynamic with such precision and sensitivity that it becomes universal.

Silver sparrow by tayari jones