Kin: Oprah's Book Club: A Novel

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK •
A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage—Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR

“Tayari Jones’s storytelling washed over me like a trip back home. . . . Kin is a masterpiece of a novel that will live with you long after you turn the last page.” —Oprah Winfrey

Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.

A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.

TAYARI JONES is the author of four novels, most recently An American Marriage, which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection and also appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list and his year-end roundup. It won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and an NAACP Image Award and has been published in two dozen countries. Jones is the C.H. Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and lives in Atlanta.

“Kin is a lush, beautiful novel about the family we make. . . . Jones maintains a light touch and a gift for effortless portraiture. . . . When reading Kin, I wanted nothing more than to keep reading it. That’s the circle Jones creates, the one that connects her voice, her characters and her readers.” —Radhika Jones, The New York Times Book Review

“Propulsive and compelling.” —The Boston Globe

“Tayari Jones’s great subject is family loyalty. . . . Kin alternates with metronomic precision between her main characters' first-person narratives. . . . Loyalties and fortitude are repeatedly tested in this immersive drama. Resilience abounds.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Jones’s dazzling novel traces the complex range of the Black experience—rich and poor, queer and straight, blessed and cursed—in the Jim Crow South.” —People

“One of the many pleasures of Kin is how deftly Jones builds the story within the context of the Jim Crow South in mid-twentieth century America. . . . Another novelist might have made these broad social concerns the focus of the story, but Jones foregrounds her characters and lets them navigate these national tensions as naturally and confidently as they move through the streets of Atlanta and Memphis.” —Ron Charles

“Jones’s emotional directness lends her prose a deep warmth. . . . Kin bucks contemporary expectations by hewing to older ones. In doing so, Jones gives the novel the same sense of inevitable tragedy that animates Edith Wharton’s books.” —The Atlantic

“Wise, often side-splittingly funny. . . . [Kin] is a pleasure to read.” —The Minnesota Star Tribune


“Kin is the kind of all-encompassing reading experience I’m always hoping to find: smart and funny and deftly profound. This is Tayari Jones’s very best work.” —Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake

“A triumphant return of one of the most important literary voices today. Vibrant, funny, moving and powerful, Kin is an unforgettable read.” —Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, author of The Mountains Sing

“A riveting and deeply moving portrait of indelible female friendship, found family and finding your way. . . . This gorgeous novel already feels like a future classic.” —Roisin O’Donnell, author of Nesting

“Beautifully written and powerfully compelling. . . . Tayari Jones interrogates social injustice through the lens of personal relationships while exploring the ways in which it shapes those relationships, and she does this in language that is intimate, conversational, and musical all at once.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“Jones delivers a triumphant novel of two motherless girls from rural Honeysuckle, Louisiana, who follow very different paths into adulthood. . . . Throughout, Jones tells her protagonists’ stories with grace, humor, and pathos. Kin is a tour de force.” ­—Publishers Weekly (starred review)