Kayla Rae Whitaker discusses Returns and Exchanges with Lynnell Edwards

About the Book:

A sweeping novel of one Kentucky family’s rise and fall throughout the 1980s—a tragicomic tour de force about love and marriage, parents and children, and the perils of mixing family with business, from the acclaimed author of The Animators
“This is the novel I’ve been missing: a sprawling, emotional, and true family saga. I fell completely in love with the characters, the story, the setting. All of it. It’s damn near perfect.”—Ayelet Waldman, author of Love & Treasure
It’s December 24, 1979, just before closing at Baker-Taylor’s discount department store, and Fran (née Baker) is surveying her domain. Her husband, Fred, is charming customers in the front of the store, while last-minute shoppers in the toy aisle are fighting over the lone remaining Atari. The older Taylor kids are on register, while the younger ones’ chaos is contained to the stockroom. All is right in the world as the new decade approaches.
With four healthy children and financial stability their own parents could have only dreamed of, Fred and Fran are the picture of the American Dream—rags to riches—with a successful chain of family-owned stores built on years of hard work and long hours. Underneath the surface, however, the business is changing at a breakneck pace, and each member of the family is struggling to keep up.
Money is transforming Fred, and the extremes he will go to in order to fit in with the slicked-back high society crowd of Lexington, Kentucky, are embarrassing, if not downright dangerous. Josiah, the oldest son, wants nothing to do with the family business; Sam is seeing things that might not really be there; and Benny and Birdie are growing up with a fraction of the parenting that their older brothers had. Meanwhile, Fran, her family’s stable core, is falling for Wendy, a cashier at Baker-Taylor’s, risking everything along the way. While trying to maintain the facade of a perfect success story, Fred and Fran learn that in matters of love and money, once it’s gone, it’s gone—no returns, no exchanges.

About the Authors:

Kayla Rae Whitaker’s work has been published in The Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed, Electric Literature, and others. Her first novel, The Animators, was named a best book of 2017 by Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Kirkus, and BookPage. Her second novel, Returns and Exchanges, will be published by Random House in May 2026. A Kentucky native, she writes and teaches in Queens, New York.

Lynnell Edwards’ most recent collections of poetry are The Bearable Slant of Light (2024) and This Great Green Valley (2020), Her short fiction, book reviews, and essays have appeared in Plume, Another Chicago Magazine, New Madrid, Connecticut Review, Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She currently serves as faculty in poetry for the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University where she is also book reviews editor for the program's literary journal Good River Review. Her poetry often investigates the deep connections between a people and their place, including the natural, political, and family narratives in its history.

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