‘Kin’: Tayari Jones’s new novel is a story of and by women, and of their shared passions

I found myself reading slowly through Tayari Jones’s new novel, Kin till the second half, where it opened up like a flower that had been tightly furled for too long. By the final pages, I realised the significance of its epigraph – “We are each other’s business.”

At its heart, Kin is a story of and by women.

The men in the novel play their roles well. They hurt, comfort, disappoint, leave, and stay. But it is the women who are its heart. Every time I thought I understood them, they revealed yet another hidden history, an old grief, a private resilience.

The remarkable women

Hattie Lee is perhaps the best example of this. Initially dismissed as “trifling”, she slowly emerges as a woman shaped by suffering, endurance, and survival. Another character, Babydoll, enters the story as the “other woman” for Annie, someone she is primed to resent. She calls herself and Annie a “package deal” to get them both employed in the new city. When their boss’s wife arrives to accuse her of sleeping with her husband, Babydoll stands as a defiant comrade instead of revealing the truth of what was actually Annie’s affair. It is an unusual relationship indeed and perhaps, only Jones could have written it.

My favourite character,...

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