Kin with Tayari Jones

Tayari Jones, the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage, has written Kin, 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. Decatur Book Festival is proud to welcome Jones, an Emory University professor and Spelman College graduate, to the stage to cap off the day. Signing information: Signing time: 5:15 PM

Signing location: First Baptist Church - Front Lawn

About the Author

Tayari Jones is the author of five novels, including 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. Her latest novel is Kin, which was also an Oprah’s Book Club selection and New York Times bestseller. She was recently named to TIME’s annual TIME100 list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.

About the Book

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK

“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.