One of Our Kind
On sale
5th June 2025
Price: £9.99
‘Your bookclub will be discussing this one for DAYS’-Jodi Picoult, author of SMALL GREAT THINGS
Get Out meets The Stepford Wives in #1 New York Times best-selling author Nicola Yoon’s first adult novel.
When Jasmyn Williams and her husband King realise they’re expecting their second child, they decide to move to the town of Liberty, California hoping to find a community of like-minded people, where their growing family can thrive in a majority-Black environment.
King settles in at once, embracing the Liberty ethos, including the luxe wellness centre at the top of the hill which proves to be the heart of the community. But Jasmyn struggles to find her place. She expected to find liberals and social justice activists striving for racial equality, but Liberty residents seem more focused on booking spa treatments and ignoring the world’s troubles.
Then, as Jasmyn gets further into her pregnancy, she discovers a terrible secret that turns her frustration to dread. A secret that could threaten the safety of not only her family, but everything she believes in…
Tense, thrilling and packed with insightful social commentary, One of Our Kind explores what happens when the quest for true liberation comes at a shocking price, from an acclaimed author at the height of her powers.
Get Out meets The Stepford Wives in #1 New York Times best-selling author Nicola Yoon’s first adult novel.
When Jasmyn Williams and her husband King realise they’re expecting their second child, they decide to move to the town of Liberty, California hoping to find a community of like-minded people, where their growing family can thrive in a majority-Black environment.
King settles in at once, embracing the Liberty ethos, including the luxe wellness centre at the top of the hill which proves to be the heart of the community. But Jasmyn struggles to find her place. She expected to find liberals and social justice activists striving for racial equality, but Liberty residents seem more focused on booking spa treatments and ignoring the world’s troubles.
Then, as Jasmyn gets further into her pregnancy, she discovers a terrible secret that turns her frustration to dread. A secret that could threaten the safety of not only her family, but everything she believes in…
Tense, thrilling and packed with insightful social commentary, One of Our Kind explores what happens when the quest for true liberation comes at a shocking price, from an acclaimed author at the height of her powers.
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Reviews
One of Our Kind [has]...a freight-train feel. It fits in with a recent wave of Black social horror that includes novels like The Other Black Girl and movies like Get Out....The warmth in Yoon's writing, though, sets this book apart. The affection and care she has for all her characters and the reasons that have taken them to Liberty deepen the novel's stakes and heighten its terror. Yoon also reminds us, through Jasmyn's friendships and her relationship with her husband, King, of the richness and intimacy of Black culture, and underlines how much more we are than our trauma.
In her first novel for adults, popular YA novelist Yoon steadily builds suspense and provocation in this chilling, subtly speculative tale via perfectly selected details and unnerving conversations as Jasmyn's growing concerns and inquisitiveness turn increasingly risky. In the mode of Percival Everett, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and Rion Amilcar Scott, Yoon presents a riveting tale spiked with surprises, laced with compassion, and designed for discussion as it raises unsettling questions about class, Blackness, parenthood, social responsibility, justice, and the hidden repercussions of deep, centuries-spanning trauma.
Nicola Yoon can write about any subject beautifully, but what she's done in One of Our Kind is as thrilling as it is lusciously written. I can't remember the last time a book kept me turning the pages so quickly, or kept me up so late. One of Our Kind is for readers who want to be taken to the edge of expectation, and solidly dropped into the middle of a new nightmare. I still have goosebumps.
Brilliant, provocative, seminal - there aren't enough adjectives to describe how much food for thought Yoon's novel provided. When cultural identity is shaped by trauma, can you even imagine who you are when that trauma is excised? What is the difference between equality and equity? And how deep into the magma of racism does implicit bias go? Your book club will be discussing this one for DAYS
With haunting and powerful prose, Nicola Yoon brilliantly imagines a world with much to tell us about our own.
Yoon maintains taut, nerve-shattering suspense throughout as she delves into societal fault lines and cultural anxieties, crafting a brutally effective examination of how generational trauma roots itself in the body. The dialogue in particular shines as the characters argue, sympathize, and search for connection with one another, even in the face of the terror that surrounds them. Yoon's latest will linger in readers' minds long after its horrifying conclusion.
Yoon is skilled at sustaining the tension throughout Jasmyn's investigations, exposing the ways that Black communities are undermined both internally and externally. It's an artful page-turning thriller, but constantly mindful that decisions about community and identity can put lives at stake. A bracing tale of the perils of groupthink and willful ignorance.