Kin
Tayari Jones, the bestselling author of An American Marriage, turns to her own family in this work that braids poetry, history, and memoir to explore the people she comes from. Centered on her ancestral ties in the American South, the book follows Jones as she pieces together the stories of relatives across generations, reckoning with the legacy of slavery, migration, and the bonds that hold a family together over time. The project, illustrated and shaped in part as a verse narrative, treats genealogy not as a dry record but as a living inheritance of names, faces, and hope passed down through hardship. Jones writes with the emotional precision that marks her fiction, asking what it means to belong to a lineage and to carry forward the memory of those who endured. The result is an intimate meditation on kinship and identity.
What you might want to know about Kin
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
The novelist traces her own family roots across generations in the American South, combining verse and history into a personal account of lineage and belonging.
Tayari Jones is an American novelist best known for An American Marriage, an award-winning and bestselling work of fiction.
Kin was written by Tayari Jones, published in 2026 by Knopf.
Kin is 368 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Kin takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
Kin is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.