Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of
Beasts Made of Night, its sequel
Crown of Thunder,
War Girls, and
Riot Baby, out this month from Tor.com. He has graduated
from Yale University, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia Law School, and L’institut d’études politiques with a Masters degree in Global Business Law.
At Electric Lit Onyebuchi tagged
seven books about surviving political and environmental disasters. One title on the list:
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
Jail, prison, and police often come together to resemble cosmic forces, morphing from individual gears in a machine ostensibly oriented towards justice into a meteorological event: a flood or typhoon that devastates communities, destabilizes 
families, and leaves those left behind barely enough time to repair what can be repaired before the next storm strikes. For too many, mass incarceration less resembles a series of choices and consequences and more resembles a natural disaster, a mini-apocalypse. The consequence in An American Marriage by Tayari Jones is the destruction of a married, middle-class African American couple. Roy is wrongfully convicted of a rape he did not commit, leaving behind his wife, Celestial. Their tough, stunning, all-too-real story spins out from there. As pervasive as America’s carceral system is in society, I’ve come across precious few novels that delve deeply into the consequences of this almost Biblical plague on those people affected, certainly few that do so with the power and pathos of Jones’s novel.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
An American Marriage is among
Ruth Reichl's six novels she enjoyed listening to while cooking,
Brad Parks's top eight books set in prisons,
Sara Shepard's six top stories of deception,and
Julia Dahl's ten top books about miscarriages of justice.
--Marshal Zeringue
from Yale University, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia Law School, and L’institut d’études politiques with a Masters degree in Global Business Law.
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