Vernice and Annie are ‘cradle friends’, both born in Louisiana, both destined never to know their mothers. The girls are inseparable, but as they grow up, their lives start to look very different in the segregated America of the 1950s and 60s.

Such is the premise of Tayari Jones’ highly anticipated new novel Kin: her first since her Women’s Prize for Fiction-winning An American Marriage, which became an instant New York Times bestseller and was championed by Oprah and Barack Obama.

In her first Aotearoa New Zealand appearance, she joins Dione Joseph to discuss her remarkable writing journey and Kin, which Ann Patchett described as “the kind of all-encompassing reading experience I’m always hoping to find: smart and funny and deftly profound”.