Kin by Tayari Jones: The Year's Best Novel So Far, According to the NYT
Tayari Jones published An American Marriage in 2018, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and became an Oprah’s Book Club selection. It is one of the more precisely realized American novels of the decade — a story about a wrongful conviction and the marriage it destroys that manages to be simultaneously a social novel and an intimate one. The follow-up has been anticipated for years.
Kin is appearing on early-year best-books lists before the critical apparatus has fully deployed. The New York Times mentioned it first in their selection of best books so far in 2026. The Book Riot editorial team characterized it as an essential read without getting into specifics that would constitute a proper review. The advance reception is uniformly strong.
What Jones does — and what An American Marriage demonstrated at length — is write about Black American life with enough specificity and emotional honesty that the novel functions as social document and intimate character study simultaneously. The title Kin suggests kinship, family, the claims that blood and history make on people who would rather not be claimed. Whether the novel is dealing with family literally or using family as the organizing metaphor for something larger is information that will emerge from reading rather than marketing.
For readers who have been waiting since An American Marriage for what comes next from Jones, the wait appears to be worth it. For readers coming to her work fresh, Kin may be the better entry point — or it may be one of those second novels so deeply in conversation with the first that the sequence matters.