The Unicorn Woman by Gayl Jones: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Finalist 2025
‘A literary giant’ Tayari Jones
We are thrilled that The Unicorn Woman by Gayl Jones is a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Finalist in 2025. Turning her unflinching eye and richly lyrical style to 1950s America, Jones weaves an ambitious, witty and moving vision of the segregated South, narrated by an Army veteran whose obsession with a sideshow attraction is refracted through a swirl of memories, literary allusions and dreams. Teeming with the unforgettable characters he encounters on his quest – for meaning, for hope, for love – The Unicorn Woman marks a bold new direction for one of the most dazzling and inventive writers of our times, hailed by Tayari Jones as ‘a literary giant’.
‘Her truth-telling, filled with beauty, tragedy, humour, and incisiveness, is unmatched’ Imani Perry
ABOUT THE BOOK
‘Gayl Jones is enjoying a dazzling late-career renaissance’ Suzi Feay, TLS
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.
‘Intricate, mesmerising and endlessly inventive’ Deesha Philyaw
