Critique du Guardian

As opening sentences go, Silver Sparrow's is a belter: "My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist," declares Dana Lynn Yarboro, setting the pace for a compulsive story that winds back the clock to the 1980s, depositing the reader in Atlanta, the author's home town and literary terroir. There, two African American half-sisters strike up an uneven friendship that will leave them both changed. Tayari Jones's 2011 novel, published in the UK for the first time following her 2019 Women's prize for fiction win with An American Marriage, finds her already mining some of the preoccupations that define her laurelled later work, including the tangled intersection of womanhood and duty. A tale of two halves, Silver Sparrow is split - equally, unlike James himself - between his 14-year-old daughters: Dana, for whom he's a fleeting weekly visitor, and his legitimate offspring, Chaurisse, who sees him simply as "daddy". By the time he met Dana's mother, James had already been married for a decade, and Chaurisse came along when Dana was just four months old. But while Chaurisse grows up in a house in a nice part of town, and Dana and her mother live in an apartment in an altogether more rackety neighbourhood, Dana has the edge on her coddled sister in at least one respect: she's grown up knowing about Chaurisse, whereas James has never confessed his affair to Chaurisse's mother. The extent to which that has warped her is palpable as Dana recalls all the times her mum, Gwen, has taken her to spy on - Gwen prefers "surveil" - James's public family. "We didn't do damage to anyone but ourselves," she explains. Still, the knowledge she holds over her half-sister electrifies the novel's second half, which is narrated by Chaurisse, still unaware of her father's double life. The girls have by then met at a science fair and become pals, with plain, academically unremarkable Chaurisse eager for some of Dana's cool to rub off on her. She thinks of Dana as a "silver girl", popular and smart, likening her to a "Barbie doll dipped in chocolate" when she first sees her. The tinge of melodrama in that opening line resurfaces occasionally. Though James is far from being a smooth-talking lothario (he stutters and wears glasses "thick as a slice of Wonder bread"), other aspects of the girls' lives - not least Dana's big reveal - are less subtle, sometimes rather inevitable. Even so, it's hard to resist the momentum of this dual coming-of-age story, and Jones's imperfect, large-hearted heroines are not soon forgotten. It's they who suffer the most from the fallout of their father's secret life, and while Jones is too shrewd an author to indulge in a tidy ending, she does let them reach for their own definitions of family.