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.
"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
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.
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.
"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
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.
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Find Kin: A Novel Tayari Jones in PDF, EPUB, ebook, audiobook, print, or library editions.
Find Kin: A Novel Tayari Jones in PDF, EPUB, ebook, audiobook, print, or library editions.
3 books in catalog
Explorations of contemporary Southern life, family dynamics, and moral dilemmas define the acclaimed novels set in Atlanta, most prominently showcased in the award-winning bestseller An American Marriage. Tayari Jones has established a distinguished body of fiction rooted in the social and emotional landscapes of Georgia and the urban American South. Her works examine how personal relationships intersect with social pressures, institutional forces, and domestic secrets.
With novels spanning from the child-murders crisis of 1970s Atlanta to intricate modern narratives of marriage and family ties, Jones brings profound nuance to Southern storytelling. Her fiction has earned wide recognition, including the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and an NAACP Image Award, while reaching international audiences in dozens of languages.
Born on November 30, 1970, in Atlanta, Georgia, Tayari Jones was raised in southwest Atlanta by her parents, Mack and Barbara Jones. Aside from a year spent in Nigeria in 1983 while her father served as a Fulbright Scholar, Jones spent her formative childhood years in Georgia's capital. She earned her bachelor's degree in English from Spelman College in 1991 before completing graduate studies at the University of Iowa and Arizona State University. She launched her novelistic career with her debut book Leaving Atlanta in 2002, followed by The Untelling in 2005 and Silver Sparrow in 2011.
Alongside her creative writing, Jones has built an extensive career in higher education. She previously taught at Prairie View A&M University and East Tennessee State University, and served as an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-large at Cornell University. She serves as the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University in Atlanta. Over the course of her career, Jones has received numerous honors, including a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.
The literary imagination of Tayari Jones is deeply anchored in Atlanta and the broader urban American South. Her narratives focus on central questions of ethics, morality, personal accountability, and emotional loyalty within Black middle-class families and communities. Jones has noted that her creative process begins when she encounters a central question to which she does not know the clear moral or ethical answer, allowing her stories to explore gray areas without offering simplistic solutions.
Her prose balances intimate psychological detail with broader social observation, often utilizing multiple perspectives to illuminate how distinct characters experience the same shared event or trauma. Whether examining secret family histories or the strains placed on personal bonds by systemic injustices, her writing highlights the complexities of domestic relationships and cultural identity.
3 books in catalog
Explorations of contemporary Southern life, family dynamics, and moral dilemmas define the acclaimed novels set in Atlanta, most prominently showcased in the award-winning bestseller An American Marriage. Tayari Jones has established a distinguished body of fiction rooted in the social and emotional landscapes of Georgia and the urban American South. Her works examine how personal relationships intersect with social pressures, institutional forces, and domestic secrets.
With novels spanning from the child-murders crisis of 1970s Atlanta to intricate modern narratives of marriage and family ties, Jones brings profound nuance to Southern storytelling. Her fiction has earned wide recognition, including the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and an NAACP Image Award, while reaching international audiences in dozens of languages.
Born on November 30, 1970, in Atlanta, Georgia, Tayari Jones was raised in southwest Atlanta by her parents, Mack and Barbara Jones. Aside from a year spent in Nigeria in 1983 while her father served as a Fulbright Scholar, Jones spent her formative childhood years in Georgia's capital. She earned her bachelor's degree in English from Spelman College in 1991 before completing graduate studies at the University of Iowa and Arizona State University. She launched her novelistic career with her debut book Leaving Atlanta in 2002, followed by The Untelling in 2005 and Silver Sparrow in 2011.
Alongside her creative writing, Jones has built an extensive career in higher education. She previously taught at Prairie View A&M University and East Tennessee State University, and served as an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-large at Cornell University. She serves as the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University in Atlanta. Over the course of her career, Jones has received numerous honors, including a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.
The literary imagination of Tayari Jones is deeply anchored in Atlanta and the broader urban American South. Her narratives focus on central questions of ethics, morality, personal accountability, and emotional loyalty within Black middle-class families and communities. Jones has noted that her creative process begins when she encounters a central question to which she does not know the clear moral or ethical answer, allowing her stories to explore gray areas without offering simplistic solutions.
Her prose balances intimate psychological detail with broader social observation, often utilizing multiple perspectives to illuminate how distinct characters experience the same shared event or trauma. Whether examining secret family histories or the strains placed on personal bonds by systemic injustices, her writing highlights the complexities of domestic relationships and cultural identity.