Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Kin,' by Tayari Jones

Tayari Jones’s new novel, “Kin,” follows two orphaned girls, Annie and Niecy, who grow up together in Louisiana in the 1950s. Annie was abandoned as a baby when her mother ran away to Memphis, while Niecy was orphaned when her father murdered her mother. The girls grow up under the shadow of loss, but at the very least they have each other, two “cradle friends” so close they’re practically sisters.

After high school, though, they take different paths: Niecy sets out for Spelman College to try to make a name for herself, while Annie flees to Memphis to seek the mother she never knew. Along the way, each must confront major questions about love and family, including what sacrifices are acceptable to achieve them.

On this week’s episode, host MJ Franklin talks about “Kin” with his colleagues Lauren Christensen and Elisabeth Egan.

Other books mentioned in this episode:

“An American Marriage,” “The Untelling” and “Silver Sparrow,” by Tayari Jones

“Clutch,” by Emily Nemens

“This Is Not About Us,” by Allegra Goodman

“Lonely Crowds,” by Stephanie Wambugu

“The Vanishing Half,” by Brit Bennett

“The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois,” by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

“Sula,” by Toni Morrison

“Beaches,” by Iris R. Dart

“Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?,” by Lorrie Moore

“Cat’s Eye,” by Margaret Atwood

“The Calamity Club,” by Kathryn Stockett

“South to America,” by Imani Perry

“Witness and Respair,” by Jesmyn Ward

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(599)

Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Yesteryear,' by Caro Claire Burke

“Yesteryear,” Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, tells the story of Natalie Heller Mills: an ultrasuccessful tradwife influencer who posts about her life on Yesteryear Ranch, a homestead where she grows...

27 Jun 58min

Art, Outrage and How the Culture Wars Began

In April 1989, a newspaper clipping about an art exhibit landed in the mailbox of the Rev. Donald Wildmon, the founder of a conservative evangelical group, the American Family Association. Partly fund...

19 Jun 34min

The Best Books of the 21st Century: Ryan Holiday on ‘The Road’

In 2024, The New York Times Book Review gathered more than 500 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets and literary enthusiasts to help pick the best books of the 21st century so far. One of those books ...

12 Jun 36min

A Summer Book Recommendation Bonanza

June is here and the long summer days are stretching out ahead, which means it’s time to settle in front of the air-conditioner with a pile of books. (Just us?) But which ones should you read this sum...

5 Jun 43min

Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Transcription,' by Ben Lerner

Ben Lerner’s slender new novel, “Transcription,” is just 130 pages long, yet it cracks open some of our most colossal and enduring philosophical questions. The novel is told in three parts. We open w...

30 Mai 47min

The Ezra Klein Show: Michael Pollan’s Journey to the Borderlands of Consciousness

Today we are delighted to share an episode from our colleagues on “The Ezra Klein Show,” originally published on March 31. Ezra interviewed author Michael Pollan, whose best-selling books include “The...

22 Mai 1h 28min

Matt Haig on ‘The Midnight Library,’ Mental Illness and Winnie-the-Pooh

Matt Haig was already several books into his career as a writer by the time he published “The Midnight Library” in 2020. One of those books, the 2015 memoir “Reasons to Stay Alive,” had even been a be...

15 Mai 42min

Patricia Cornwell on Her Dark Childhood and Best-Selling Novels

“Angel Down,” a grisly novel about World War I told in a single, almost 300-page-long sentence, was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In a review for The New York Times, Ben H. Winters d...

8 Mai 59min