Overview

""A suspenseful family drama with powerful themes of social justice."" -Bruce Holsinger, author of Culpability, an Oprah Book Club pick In the summer of 2020, social justice protests and the removal of Confederate monuments rock the city of Richmond, Virginia, as the marriages of two estranged sisters implode. When Cynthia's husband, Bobby, can no longer hide his dire financial situation, their union finally ruptures. Melissa, her sister, has dedicated herself so fully to racial justice activism that she becomes alienated from her own Black husband. As the summer heats up and their marriages veer in opposite directions, the sisters have no choice but to turn to one another. Meanwhile, their husbands conspire in a racial reckoning that their ancestors-one old Virginia White, the other old Virginia Black-would never have dreamed of. When secrets within marriage erode trust, all couples must decide what's more important: being true to who they are as individuals or holding on to an illusion of the past. Marriage and Other Monuments is a must-read multigenerational drama set against a tumultuous time of racial tension in the South.

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Reviews

""Marriage and Other Monuments is a riveting contemporary narrative that intertwines suspenseful family drama, powerful themes of social justice, and a plot ripped soulfully from the headlines. Pye tells a story of race, marriage, and politics ideal for book club discussions and sure to satisfy readers of every stripe."" -Bruce Holsinger, author of Culpability, an Oprah Book Club pick ""Every so often, we have a powerful sense of living in history. Sisters Melissa and Cynthia have grown up with history looming over them in the form of the statues and monuments to Confederate generals in Richmond, Virginia. The sense of living in a historical moment comes to a head in the summer of 2020, when Richmond is rocked by Covid and the BLM movement, and there are protests against the statues and demands for them to come down. The personal is political in this smart novel as the sisters' marriages become entangled with new allegiances and both couples are forced to examine what truly matters for all time."" -Alice Elliott Dark, author of Fellowship Point and In the Gloaming ""Working in the romance tradition established by Jane Austen and deliciously subverted by Edith Wharton, Virginia Pye delivers a superb novel of Covid and semiurban Southern manners. With startling command of craft, she delivers a novel in which small triumphs-of art and in life-become the abiding monuments, as love, and the failures of love, eclipse politics."" -Alice Randall, author of Black Bottom Saints and The Wind Done Gone ""Fans of Ann Napolitano and Mary Beth Keane: Buy this novel immediately! An engrossing, timely family saga, Virginia Pye's Marriage and Other Monuments explores complicated truths about race and class-and love and desire-in the contemporary South, shining a brilliant light on the turmoil of 2020 through the lens of history."" -Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year and A Fortunate Age ""Marriage and Other Monuments is a time capsule, a work of history about a most anxious present. It is also a moving drama of two couples, four people in midlife still trying to find their way. However the events work out, this is a novel written with a faith that justice can prevail if people of good will make it happen."" -Christopher Tilghman, author of On the Tobacco Coast and Mason's Retreat ""In Marriage and Other Monuments, Virginia Pye vividly captures a pivotal moment in recent history and successfully applies the myriad of questions asked-the hows and whys and cause and effect-to the institution of marriage. Like history, her complicated and conflicted characters are left to the reckonings and consequences of their choices."" -Jill McCorkle, author of Old Crimes and Hieroglyphics

""Marriage and Other Monuments is a riveting contemporary narrative that intertwines suspenseful family drama, powerful themes of social justice, and a plot ripped soulfully from the headlines. Pye tells a story of race, marriage, and politics ideal for book club discussions and sure to satisfy readers of every stripe."" -Bruce Holsinger, author of Culpability, an Oprah Book Club pick ""Fans of Ann Napolitano and Mary Beth Keane: Buy this novel immediately! An engrossing, timely family saga, Virginia Pye's Marriage and Other Monuments explores complicated truths about race and class-and love and desire-in the contemporary South, shining a brilliant light on the turmoil of 2020 through the lens of history."" -Joanna Rackoff, author of My Salinger Year

Author Information

Virginia Pye is the author of four award-winning books of fiction, including two post-colonial historical novels set in China, River of Dust and Dreams of the Red Phoenix, the short story collection, Shelf Life of Happiness, and her previous novel, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann, a love story to writers and readers set in Gilded Age Boston. Virginia's essays have appeared in The New York Times, Literary Hub, Publishers Weekly, Writer's Digest, and elsewhere. She has taught writing at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania, and, most recently, at Grub Street in Boston. Virginia is the fiction editor of the literary journal Pangyrus, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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