Kin: Oprah's Book Club: A Novel

Tayari Jones

Feb 2026 · Sold by Knopf

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

One of the best if not the best novel that I've read in my adulthood and I'm in my eighties, from Charleston, graduate of Howard University. Excellent characters and descriptions. Twist and turns in plots and action just when you think you have what's going to happen next and no idea how it would end. I"ll recommend it to my other book club and personal friends and have been led to read other of her novels.

An incredible book about female friendship with amazing charecters.

About the author

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.