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.

To understand what Stephen Hunter has built across four decades of fiction, you have to first understand what he is outside of it. Hunter spent nearly forty years as a newspaper journalist and film critic — first at the Baltimore Sun, where he joined in 1971 and became its film critic in 1982, then at the Washington Post, where he served as chief film critic from 1997 until accepting a buyout in 2008.