For Tayari Jones, All Roads and All Novels Lead to Atlanta

In “Kin,” the follow-up to the best-selling “An American Marriage,” she looks back on the place and the people that forged her.

By Elizabeth Egan

After her fourth novel, “An American Marriage,” was anointed by Oprah, spent almost six months on the best-seller list and sold over a million copies, Tayari Jones had one goal: to move home to Atlanta. She’d been away for more than two decades.

“I needed to come back to reclaim my accent,” Jones said.

Not just her Southern twang, she explained, but her writing voice, a piquant blend of friction, tenderness and heat.

That voice is on full display in “Kin,” Jones’s follow up to her 2018 blockbuster, coming out from Knopf on Feb. 24. The book, a paean to friendship which Jones described as “‘Sula’ meets ‘Beaches,’” is her first historical novel. It should clinch Jones’s place among the bards of Atlanta, alongside Anne River Siddons, Natasha Trethewey and Alfred Uhry.

But, like Jones’s career as a whole, “Kin” was a slow burn.

“I’ve always been a limber type of writer, but this is the first time when I’m writing a book that I didn’t plan to write,” she said. “I had to just surrender to it.” Read the full piece at the New York Times.