Palmares

Palmares is a historical novel by the American writer Gayl Jones, published by Beacon Press in 2021. It is her first work in more than twenty years, and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2022.

The novel is told retrospectively by Almeyda, who begins as a seven-year-old on a plantation in Brazil in the 1670s, where she is known as Almeydita. She grows up there with her mother and her eccentric grandmother, and while she is still a child she meets a free black woman from Palmares.

Palmares is a city governed by freed and escaped slaves, and what she hears about it shapes the rest of her life. The book follows her as she travels through the country looking for a husband who has gone missing, and it takes in the whole of a life lived in a place and a century that were violent and unsettled.

Jones sent the first draft of the novel to her publisher in 1997, by which time she had been working on it for twenty years; it was eventually published in 2021 in its finished form.