Vernice and Annie grew up side by side in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, two girls raised without their mothers. Tayari Jones follows the very different lives they go on to lead.

Readical Key Points

• A novel of lifelong friendship between two women from a small Louisiana town
• An Oprah's Book Club pick and New York Times bestseller
• Starred reviews from Booklist and Library Journal
• By the author of An American Marriage
• Hardcover, 368 pages, Knopf, 2026

Vernice, raised by a determined aunt, leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she finds a circle of well-connected Black women and a world in which money and manners decide who gets ahead. Annie, left by her mother as a child, sets out to find her, a search that takes her far from home and into real danger. The novel moves between their two paths across the American South and across the years.

Readers of An American Marriage will recognize Jones's attention to family and loyalty, and readers drawn to novels of female friendship will find two women written with wit and depth over a lifetime. Honeysuckle is a small town. The distance between these two lives is not small at all.

About the Author

Tayari Jones is the author of four previous novels, including An American Marriage, an Oprah's Book Club selection that won the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize and an NAACP Image Award. She is the C.H. Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.

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