Kin

 'Smart and funny and deftly profound. This is Tayari Jones's very best work.' Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake

Vernice and Annie are ‘cradle friends’, both born in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, both destined never to know their mothers. The girls are inseparable, bound by a friendship far deeper than sisterhood, but as they grow up, their lives start to look very different in the segregated America of the 1950s and 60s.Both girls leave Honeysuckle in search of something that might fill the hole left by their absent mothers: a university education, the promise of a first love affair, the hope offered by the simmering civil rights movement. But it is Annie whose bad decisions pull her into a world of danger, leaving her oldest friend to battle to save her. Tayari Jones returns with an exuberant, richly told novel about mothers and daughters, about a lifelong friendship, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South.

Tayari Jones is the internationally bestselling author of four novels, most recently An American Marriage, winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019. Jones is the recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship and a Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. She is also a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Born in Atlanta, Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is currently professor of Creative Writing at Emory University and an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.