The Unicorn Woman

The Pulitzer Prize Finalist for 2025
Set in the American South of the early 50s, The Unicorn Woman is a riveting imagining of hope, frustration, and imagination from of the most powerful voices in American literature.

'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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