Poignant and powerful. Heartbreaking and wryly funny. With effortless wit, a felicity of phrasing, and memorable sentences (“she was as drunk as four skunks and a rhino”), Jones, author of the acclaimed bestseller An American Marriage, weaves the lives of ‘cradle friends,’ as Annie and Vernice call themselves. It is a story of love in its many forms, and of family – mothers and daughters, class, ambition, friendship and fate.

Annie was less than a month old when her 16-year-old mother, Hattie Lee, “unhooked me from her nipple and forked my bundled body to Granny, who was preoccupied with a hunk of pecan candy.” Dropping out of high school, Annie leaves Honeysuckle, Louisiana, and sets off with Babydoll and Bobo in search of her mother. When their car breaks down, they find shelter in a sharecropper’s whorehouse. Washing bloodied bedsheets, Babydoll stands at the hand pump, “bitter as pecan bark.”

Ambitious for a better, bourgeois life, Vernice – whose mother was killed (no spoiler) – heads to Spelman College, the historic liberal arts university for Black women in Atlanta. In the segregated South of the 1950s – which Jones portrays with quiet precision – Vernice boards a bus unsure if she should sit “in the back of the front or the front of the back.”

At Spelman (funded, in real life, by the noblesse oblige of the Rockefeller family), where she acquires the nickname “Country Mouse” for her naive shyness, Vernice instantly falls in love with her dormitory roommate from an upper-class Black family. “If my body was the record, her gaze was the needle that made it sing,” Niecy says.

Society’s demands are not easy to break, and Niecy succumbs to the manipulations of Mrs McHenry, the socially ambitious town matron who not so subtly promotes her son, a lawyer. As Mrs McHenry sees it, Vernice is not only getting a husband, but a mother.

Eventually, love and loyalty – family, class and friendship – collide.

Selected for her book club, Oprah Winfrey describes Kin as “a masterpiece of a novel that contemplates the meaning and complications of love and friendship… it will live with you long after you turn the last page.”

Buy Kin here.