Tayari Jones | Kin
Fri 5 Jun 2026 | 8:00pm - 9:00pm
Tayari Jones returns with a luminous, deeply moving novel about mothers and daughters, and two lifelong friends whose worlds collide after years apart.
Vernice and Annie are born within days of each other in Honeysuckle, Louisiana. Inseparable throughout their childhood, the girls are united by a shared loss, for neither one will ever know her own mother. Coming of age in the segregated America of the 1950s and 60s, at a time when women had few choices and little control over their own bodies, fate leads them down very different paths. Vernice pursues the education that her fiercely determined aunt envisaged for her, but it is marriage into an affluent family that provides her with a way to leave Honeysuckle behind. Yet as Vernice looks to the future, Annie becomes possessed by an all-consuming desire to find her absent mother. When that search pulls her into a world of danger, it’s Vernice, her oldest friend, who must risk everything to save her.
‘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.’
— author Ann Patchett
Kin is an emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction. Usually based in the US, we’re delighted to have Tayari with us in Cambridge for this exciting new novel.
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Book a ticket for this event and the Leïla Slimani event – happening on the same evening – and get a 25% discount on your order. Both tickets need to be booked at the same rate e.g. 2 x Full Price tickets or 2 x Concession tickets.
Venue: University Arms
Duration: 1 hour
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Please note: A £2 transaction fee will be added to your basket at the checkout. The £2 fee stays the same regardless of the number of tickets or events you are booking.
Author Biography
Tayari Jones is the internationally bestselling author of five novels, including An American Marriage, winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019, the Aspen Words Prize, and an NAACP Image Award. An Oprah’s Book Club Selection, it appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list, was published in two dozen countries, and has sold over 350,000 copies in the UK alone.
Jones is the recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship and a Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. She is currently professor of Creative Writing at Emory University and an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
