Kin by Tayari Jones: Celebrating Black Women’s Stories
Seven years is a long time between novels. Seven years is long enough for a friendship to transform, for a woman to reinvent herself, for an entire country to change its mind about what it owes its people. Kin by Tayari Jones arrives after that kind of silence, and it arrives with the confidence of a writer who has spent those years listening rather than rushing. Jones, whose previous novels include the Oprah’s Book Club selection An American Marriage, the inventive Silver Sparrow, The Untelling, and Leaving Atlanta, has built a career on excavating the interior lives of Black Americans with surgical precision and enormous heart. With Kin, she reaches further back in time and deeper into the tangled roots of female friendship than she has ever gone before. Set primarily in the 1950s and early 1960s, the novel follows two women raised side by side in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, a small Southern town whose name promises sweetness but delivers something far more complicated. Vernice, nicknamed Niecy, is reared by her formidable Aunt Irene after her …
