Vernice and Annie are 'cradle friends', both born in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, both destined never to know their mothers. The girls are inseparable, bound by a friendship far deeper than sisterhood, but as they grow up, their lives start to look very different in the segregated America of the 1950s and 60s.

Both girls leave Honeysuckle in search of something that might fill the hole left by their absent mothers: a university education, the promise of a first love affair, the hope offered by the simmering civil rights movement. But it is Annie whose bad decisions pull her into a world of danger, leaving her oldest friend to battle to save her.

Tayari Jones returns with an exuberant, richly told novel about mothers and daughters, about a lifelong friendship, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South.