PB Book Club: Kin by Tayari Jones

Join Sara of Picture Book, and friend-of-the-bookstore Stephanie to discuss our next book club pick, by Tayari Jones.

Tayari Jones, the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage, 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.

Our book club is casual, open to all, and we provide cheese from Bloomy, and some beverages. Please RSVP so we have a good headcount for setting up seating. This is a free event and we appreciate if you buy the book from Picture Book when you can to help support the shop. Kin is available to pick up in person at the shop Monday-Friday 9-5, on our website, and as an audiobook.

"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.

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 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

Picture Book is a local independent bookstore founded in 2020 inside the co-working and event space HudCo in Dobbs Ferry, New York.