Two Novels of Family Loyalty, Love & Loss

The bonds between mothers, daughters and lifelong friends come under pressure in new novels by Edwidge Danticat and Tayari Jones. The authors discuss their work Saturday, November 21 at Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus’s Chapman Conference Center in downtown Miami, as part of Miami Book Fair.

Danticat’s Dèy follows Magnolia, a Haitian American woman who experiences a random act of violence and tells no one. In its aftermath, she reassesses her relationship with her daughter, a nearly broken partnership and her mother’s mental health struggles while confronting the day’s losses. A MacArthur fellow and Neustadt International Prize for Literature recipient, Danticat is the author of Breath, Eyes, Memory and the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning memoir Brother, I’m Dying.

Jones’s Kin traces the diverging lives of Vernice and Annie, childhood friends and neighbors raised without their mothers in Honeysuckle, Louisiana. One enters a world of affluence, aspiration and inequality; the other undertakes a dangerous search for the mother who abandoned her. Their stories explore friendship, opportunity and womanhood in the American South. Jones’s previous novel, An American Marriage, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Writer and critic Jodi-Ann Burey moderates. The session begins at 1:45 p.m. in Building 3, second floor, Room 3210. Admission is free with a paid Saturday Street Fair ticket, but a separate event ticket is required. A copy of the book is not included.