Kin: Oprah's Book Club

Two girls raised side by side. Two very different paths. A lifelong friendship that time, distance, and tragedy cannot erase.

Vernice and Annie grow up as best friends and neighbors in Honeysuckle, Louisiana. Both are motherless daughters, but the circumstances of their childhoods—and the futures awaiting them—could hardly be more different.

Raised by a determined aunt who provides the stability her mother could not, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen to attend Spelman College. There, she enters a world of ambitious and influential women and encounters new ideas about success, opportunity, inequality, and the life she wants to build.

Annie, meanwhile, remains haunted by the mother who abandoned her. Determined to find her and fill the emptiness she left behind, Annie sets off on a very different journey—one filled with love and adventure, but also danger and hardship.

As the years pass, the two women build separate lives, until a devastating tragedy brings their worlds together once again.

Rich with emotion, humor, and unforgettable characters, Kin is a sweeping story about female friendship, mothers and daughters, sisterhood, family, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South.

Perfect for readers who love: literary fiction, powerful female friendships, Southern fiction, complicated families, mothers and daughters, coming-of-age stories, multigenerational relationships, and character-driven novels.

Author: Tayari Jones
Genre: Literary Fiction / Contemporary Fiction / Women’s Fiction
Language: English
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: February 24, 2026
EAN/ISBN: 9780525659181

Notable: Oprah’s Book Club Selection