Annie and Vernice (or Niecy, as Annie calls her) are “cradle friends”, brought up in their home town of Honeysuckle, Louisiana, in 1950s America. The protagonists are defined by their motherlessness and their diverging drives to escape their individual tragedies and pre-written destinies. In this haunting novel of motherhood and sisterhood, Tayari Jones writes into unknowability – how far we can know another person, or indeed oneself.
The pair, who speak in alternating chapters, are “not the same, but still the same”. Each is tended to by mother figures – grandmothers, aunts – and gives meaning to each other’s lonely, questioning existence: “When you don’t have your mother, you don’t really know who you are.” Annie’s mother has abandoned her but is apparently alive in Memphis, and she makes it her obsession to reconcile with her; Niecy’s, on the other hand, is lost for ever, murdered by Niecy’s father. Where the former is holding out hope, the latter has none; and herein lies the fork in their futures. While Niecy chooses the sensible, stable life path – college, a traditional marriage – Annie spirals from tragedy to tragedy, consumed by thoughts of her missing mother. Call it destiny, or a kind of grieving.
Jones’s idiomatic, hypnotic prose pulls you in, and she playfully threads tropes of twinning, doubling and foiling throughout the novel, which alleviates the melancholy and makes the plot twists shine. “Some truths are too bitter to let sit on your tongue”, we’re told; merciless violence and melodrama are kept off the page as the pair navigate the faultlines of racism and classism (there’s an incident on a bus, and another in a laundromat, where Jones shows remarkable restraint). She re-utilises the epistolary device in her Women’s prize-winning novel, An American Marriage, to glue the women together through words as the years tear them in different directions. When they eventually reunite, will they recognise who they’ve each become, now with a new set of secrets in tow? “I struggled to decide if secrets and lies were twins, regular sisters, or just cousins.”
Ultimately, the novel dissects what happens when you love selflessly, endlessly, unrequitedly, into the dark; when maternal love, or the lack thereof, turns poisonous and parasitic; and when a mother’s love, one that’s supposed to nourish and sustain your soul, instead drains and destroys it (“Everything requires water to live. But not too much. That’s the paradox of water. You need it, but it can kill you”). By turns pacy and profound, Kin is a cautionary tale about the limits of love, both rendered and received: “Love, I learned, was the responsibility of the one doing the loving. The other person didn’t necessarily have to make a contribution to the stew.” And “that’s why you got to be careful who you give it to. They can put your love in their back pocket and never give it back.”
Is there a more fundamental loss, a more acute fissure than that caused by losing the one who gave you life? “Grief is a kind of spell”, and with Kin, Jones casts one on her readers, leaving us certain something has – quietly, almost unknowingly – stirred within our souls.
• Kin by Tayari Jones is published by Oneworld (£18.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
