Publishers Weekly
07/19/2021
Jones (Mosquito) reemerges after a 21-year hiatus with an epic and inventive saga that weaves together magic, mythology, and Portuguese colonial history. Eight-year-old Almeyda is enslaved on a 17th-century Brazilian plantation when her enslaver welcomes a man who seeks the blood of a Black virgin for a cure. While an herbal drink from her mother serves as protection, the price for it comes heavy as the mother is sold and separated from her. Later, as a young woman, Almeyda is rescued and taken to Palmares, a hidden settlement for freedom seekers. There, she is chosen by settlement member Anninho and the two are married. Soon after, Palmares is razed by Portuguese soldiers and its leader, King Zumbi, is killed. While in the soldiers’ custody, Almeyda wakes to find her husband gone. Determined to reunite with him, Almeyda escapes again to journey through Brazil. She hears of a New Palmares and that Zumbi’s spirit may still be alive, perhaps transformed into a bird, and apprentices with a medicine woman who knows Anninho and gives her a lead on his whereabouts. The magical elements are difficult to get an initial purchase on, as they aren’t given much explanation, but Jones brings her established incisiveness and linguistic flair to the horrifyingly accurate portrayal of racial struggle. All in all, it’s a triumphant return. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
A remarkable new outing from a major voice in American letters.”
—Esquire
“A legendary African American novelist returns with her first novel in 22 years, an epic adventure of enchantment, enslavement, and the pursuit of knowledge in 17th-century Brazil . . . . Those familiar with Corregidora (1975) and Eva’s Man (1976) will not be surprised by the sustained intensity of both imagery and tone. There is also sheer wonder, insightful compassion, and droll wit to be found among the book’s riches. Jones seems to have come through a life as tumultuous as her heroine’s with her storytelling gifts not only intact, but enhanced and enriching.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“Jones makes a strong return with a mesmerizing epic of late seventeenth-century Brazil. . . . Jones’ storytelling exerts a powerful pull, and readers will achieve complete immersion in a setting in which African and Indigenous cultures are memorably delineated. Through richly woven prose, Almeyda’s journey compels reflection on how freedom must always be defended and how women bear extra societal burdens. Mystical sequences give the plot additional depth and texture. . . . [A] superb reclamation of the historical novel.”
—Booklist
“An epic and inventive saga . . . a triumphant return.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Now published, the book proves to be one of her most ambitious and, at times, extraordinary works of fiction. . . . By telling a story about the pursuit of freedom, Jones and Almeyda also create a place where Black freedom, if not realized, can at least be imagined, and thus remains a possibility.”
—The Nation
“Palmares is that rare thing, a life’s work . . . . Unlike anything else that will be published this year.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Sprawling, but intimate and dreamily intense in the telling.”
—Daily Mail (UK)
“Astonishingly rich in character and incident, filled with magic and mystery.”
—The Sunday Times (UK)
“Palmares reinvents 17th-century Black Brazil in all its multiplicity, beauty, humanity and chaos. A once-in-a-lifetime work of literature, the kind that changes your understanding of the world.”
—The Guardian
“With Palmares, Jones has built an intricate world, channeled voices from the dead, merged history and memory to create an epic neo-slave narrative. . . . a dazzling picture of love, survival and the monstrous creation of a nation. Jones’ life work is a gift and long love song to the memory of millions.”
—The Undefeated
“A quilt of many colors and textures, held together with patterns of incantatory language and vivid description.”
—Historical Novel Society
"In writing a novel called Palmares, Gayl Jones, recognized since the 1970s as one of America’s most important black writers, is breaking new literary ground and performing a laudable act of historical redemption."
—The New York Review of Books
“A literary giant, and one of my absolute favorite writers.“
—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage
“No novel about any black woman could ever be the same after this.”
—Toni Morrison, on reading the manuscript for Corregidora
“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, humor, and incisiveness, is unmatched. Jones is a writer’s writer, and her influence is found everywhere.”
—Imani Perry, author of Looking for Lorraine and Breathe
“Jones had a marked effect . . . on an entire generation of writers, whether they realized it or not.”
—Calvin Baker, The Atlantic
“Jones’s great achievement is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them.”
—Anna Wiener, The New Yorker
“Gayl Jones has presented problems that are living, historical and important additions to the current American—not just black—scene. Her novels are genuinely imaginative creations.”
—Darryl Pinckney, The New Republic
“Gayl Jones conjures with deep intimacy and immediacy a brutal world that is centuries past but fully alive with spirit and mystery. Page after breathtaking page, her prose is intricate, mesmerizing, and endlessly inventive and subversive. Palmares is absolutely stunning!”
—Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2021-08-04
A legendary African American novelist returns with her first novel in 22 years, an epic adventure of enchantment, enslavement, and the pursuit of knowledge in 17th-century Brazil.
Jones' compelling narrator is Almeyda, an enslaved girl who learned to read and write not just in Portuguese, but in English and other languages. This gives her a wide perspective on her surroundings that allows her more curiosity and sophistication than other Blacks in bondage and, for that matter, many of the Whites holding dominion over her. Whether it’s the imperious Father Tollinare, a White priest partly responsible for Almeyda’s education, or her grandmother Ituiba, who seems irrational to just about everybody except Almeyda, the people who populate Almeyda’s tumultuous coming-of-age are as rife with mystery and complexity as the surrounding landscape with its dense forests, treacherous terrain, and wildly diverse human outposts. As Almeyda is sold to different masters and different plantations, her circle of acquaintances widens to include more exotic European visitors (including an eccentric lexicographer helping Tollinare publish a new Portuguese dictionary and a British travel writer packing some of Jane Austen’s gimlet wit) and many more Black and native Brazilians, some enslaved, some free; some cursed with delusions, touched by genius, or linked to sorcery. She finds love and liberation with a charismatic Muslim named Martim Anninho, whom she marries and accompanies to the novel’s (real-life) eponymous refuge for fugitive slaves. The community is besieged and then destroyed by war, and Almeyda, separated in the chaos from Anninho, embarks on a long and perilous mission to locate a “New Palmares” and find her husband. As with the most ambitious and haunting of magical realist sagas, Jones’ novel recounts detail after detail with such fluidity that the reader is aware of time’s passage without knowing how many years have gone by. And by this novel’s end, you’re made aware that there is far more of Almeyda’s and Anninho’s saga to come. Those familiar with Corregidora (1975) and Eva’s Man (1976) will not be surprised by the sustained intensity of both imagery and tone. There is also sheer wonder, insightful compassion, and droll wit to be found among the book’s riches. Jones seems to have come through a life as tumultuous as her heroine’s with her storytelling gifts not only intact, but enhanced and enriching.
It is marvelous, in every sense, to have a new Gayl Jones novel to talk about.
