What is the title of your latest release?
THE FOURSOME
What's the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
Inspired by my own family history: the strange-but-true story of two sisters in nineteenth-century North Carolina (my distant cousins) who married Chang and Eng Bunker, the world-famous conjoined twins. Together, the two couples had twenty-one children. The twins’ lives are well documented; their wives’ are not. The Foursome imagines the inner life of Sarah Yates, a woman navigating loyalty and identity in a rigidly defined world – and asks how we reckon with a fraught and complicated time in American history.
How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
The setting chose me. My mother’s entire family is from North Carolina, not far from the Bunker plantation, and I grew up hearing fragments of the story. Once I learned that Sarah Yates Bunker had been buried in an unmarked grave – not in the family plot, but beside formerly enslaved people and the four daughters she lost – I knew the book had to live in that landscape.
Would you hang out with your heroine in real life?
Sarah is the quieter sister, the one slowly waking up to what she’s been taught not to see. I’d love to sit on a porch with her at dusk and listen to what she has to say.
What are three words that describe your hero?
There are four hearts beating at the center of this book, and each could take this question in a different direction. For Sarah: Watchful, curious, divided.
What's something you learned while writing this book?
How much of what we call history is often just a matter of what someone chose to write down. Finding Sarah and Adelaide in the margins of a ledger, a letter, a census entry – that was the whole apprenticeship of this novel.
Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
I try to allow myself a lot of play time, a lot of freedom, in the first draft. Then I edit relentlessly. I can’t leave a sentence alone until it earns its place.
What's your favorite foodie indulgence?
I love omakase, but it’s a splurge!
Describe your writing space/office!
I write on the couch, in bed, at coffee shops: if I create strict rules about how and when I should write, I won’t write. So I’m flexible.
Who is an author you admire?
One of many, many: Gustave Flaubert. For his economy and irony.
Is there a book that changed your life?
To continue the Flaubert theme, MADAME BOVARY taught me what a novel can be.
Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published). Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
I went to lunch with my young agent and an editor at HarperCollins who liked the book. She said I needed to go away and do another draft, and then she’d decide, and I persuaded her to put me under contract. I love to be under contract; I’m like one of those birds that breeds best in captivity. I love being under contract!
What's your favorite genre to read?
Whatever the genre, I seek out good, clear, delightful, surprising writing. I love writers who love words.
What's your favorite movie?
My father’s favorite movie was Cabaret. I think it’s the only movie I actually own. I love the songs so much! I often watch it for the musical numbers alone.
What is your favorite season?
Summer in Maine.
How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
With my three boys (now men!) and my husband. They’re creative gift-givers and I feel surrounded by love.
What's a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
We finally watched Mad Men, and it was worth the hype (and the time).
What's your favorite type of cuisine?
Asian, of all kinds.
What do you do when you have free time?
Read, travel, cook, hike, see friends and family, watch something great.
What can readers expect from you next?
More stories from the margins: ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and the interior lives that history cannot reveal.
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Christina Baker Kline comes a boldly original reimagining of the astonishing true story of two sisters in nineteenth-century North Carolina — Kline’s own distant relatives — who married world-famous conjoined twins from Siam.
When Eng and Chang Bunker arrive in Wilkes County in 1839, they’re not just a curiosity—they’re a sensation. Everyone is eager to learn whether the salacious rumors about them are true. Within months, the twins have opened a general store, bought land, and begun building a plantation. Now, word has it, they’re looking for wives—and in a place that thrives on gossip and legacy, their ambitions set the community on edge.
Sarah and Adelaide Yates, daughters of a once-prominent local family brought low by scandal, are drawn into their orbit. Bold, beautiful Adelaide sees in the twins’ fame a chance to reclaim her future. Sarah, quiet and observant, isn’t so sure. When the twins’ lives become entangled with theirs, they must navigate loyalty, longing, and identity in a world where everything—including race, class, and gender—is rigidly defined.
Spanning five decades and unfolding against the backdrop of a fractured nation hurtling toward war, The Foursome is both intimate and epic: a story of love and constraint, identity and reinvention. With piercing insight and emotional precision, Kline brings to life a forgotten chapter of American history and the complex, boundary-defying marriages at its center.
Women's Fiction Family Life | Fiction Literary [ William Morrow, On Sale: May 12, 2026, Trade Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9780063497160 / ]
Christina Baker Kline is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, including Orphan Train, The Exiles, Please Don’t Lie (with Anne Burt), and the forthcoming The Foursome (May 2026). Published in more than 40 countries, her novels have received the New England Prize for Fiction, the Maine Literary Award, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Award, among others, and have been chosen by hundreds of communities, schools, and universities as “One Book” selections.
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