Tayari Jones

“Smart and funny and deftly profound. This is Tayari Jones’s very best work.”—Ann Patchett

We are delighted that Tayari Jones, the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage, will be joining us at Kepler’s for the first time to talk about her magnificent new novel, Kin. The story of two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart, Jones’s narrative sparkles with wit, intelligence, and deep feeling.

About the Book 

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.

About the Speaker

 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 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 and lives in Atlanta.

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