The Cemetery of Untold Stories

Writer Alma Cruz understands what it means to live in dependence on one’s own invented fates: her close friend, for the sake of literature, paid with her health and ruined her relationships with her family. Alma doesn’t want to repeat that path. Unable, after many years, to finish her main book, she decides to put a radical end to it — bury the manuscripts on her property in her native Dominican Republic. But the buried stories don’t go quiet: the characters begin to speak up — first barely, then more and more insistently. A woman named Filomena, endowed with the rare gift of hearing other people’s voices, becomes the one who accepts these revived tales and protects them. So the literary cemetery turns into a space where an entire generation of nameless people can finally speak without fear and be heard. Julia Alvarez’s novel, the author of “The Time of the Butterflies,” is a many-voiced story about memory and love, about the power of words and their magic, able to resist oblivion.