The Unicorn Woman: The Pulitzer Prize Finalist for 2025
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'A literary giant' TAYARI JONES
A richly imaginative and moving new novel from the Pulitzer finalist and acclaimed author of Corregidora
A cook and tractor repairman, Buddy was known as Budweiser to his army pals because he's a wise guy. But underneath that surface, he's a man on a quest: looking for religion, looking for meaning, looking for love.
Returning from the Second World War not to a hero's welcome, but to the discrimination of the Jim Crow laws, Buddy stumbles across the Unicorn Woman, a carnival sideshow with a horn growing from her forehead, whose strange beauty he can't forget.
As he drifts across the South, from Kentucky to Memphis, Buddy encounters a dazzling array of almost mythic characters: circus barkers, topiary trimmers, landladies who provide shelter and plenty of advice for their all-Black clientele, proto feminists and bigots - dreaming all the while of the unforgettable Unicorn Woman herself.
With her inimitable eye for beauty, tragedy and humour, Jones offers a rich, intriguing exploration of the Black imagination in a time of frustration and hope.
'Her truth-telling, filled with beauty, tragedy, humour, and incisiveness, is unmatched' IMANI PERRY
'Gayl Jones is enjoying a dazzling late-career renaissance' SUZI FEAY, TLS
'Intricate, mesmerising and endlessly inventive' DEESHA PHILYAW
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Praise for The Unicorn Woman
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Gayl Jones's work represents a watershed in American literature. From a literary standpoint, her form is impeccable; from a historical standpoint, she stands at the very cutting edge of understanding the modern world, and as a Black woman writer, her truth-telling, filled with beauty, tragedy, humour, and incisiveness, is unmatched. Jones is a writer's writer, and her influence is found everywhere
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A literary giant, and one of my absolute favourite writers
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Palmares enfolds the reader in a bygone world, with a glance to our own, and has a great whispering lushness that is both magical and panoramic
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No novel about any Black woman could ever be the same after this
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A breathtaking novel that stands as one of the most important twentieth century works of African American literature
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Gayl Jones is enjoying a dazzling late-career renaissance [...] Through Buddy's picaresque journey, Gayl Jones
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shows her mastery of both dialogue and interiority. . . we find encounter after
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encounter with richly individuated characters, each
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sporting his or her own verbal idiosyncrasies, as
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noted by a well-read travelling man with an acute ear
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for speech patterns, just like his creator. - TLS
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