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A Novel
by Christina Baker KlineFrom #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.
Prologue
Surry County, North Carolina
1886
Whose story is this to tell?
Most would agree it isn't mine. I'm not the hero or the villain, the pursuer or even, really, the pursued. I'm just the one who went along.
But maybe the story doesn't belong to anyone. Maybe it's a question of who has the nerve and the need to tell it.
* * *
My mind holds memories like constellations, each glowing with its own light. Some brighten as the sky goes dark; others fade, their edges blurring. The older I get, the more these memories merge, forming shifting patterns. I sift through them slowly, gauging the weight of emotion, the gravitational pull of significance. Trying to make sense of it all.
* * *
Sinful. perverted. mad.
Those were some of the things people said about us. When word spread that the four of us shared one bed, our good neighbors' imaginations ran wild. Rumors flew about incest, unnatural relations, adultery, all kinds of depravities. No respectable woman would permit such an abomination. No God-...
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (6/4/2026)
I am listening to Calamity Club and am really enjoying it. It is easier as I am in a car for about an hour a day. I am starting The Foursome by Christina Baker Kline.
-Antoinette_B
Ann Napolitano, bestselling author of Hello, Beautiful
Christina Baker Kline is a masterful storyteller with an extraordinary subject in The Foursome. Chang and Eng can literally never be apart, which means that their wives—Addie and her sister Sarah—are also held in an impossible proximity to each other. What a wonderful study of intimacy of all kinds, of love and tolerance, of growing together and growing apart. In short, of what it is to be human. Sadeqa Johnson, New York Times bestselling author of Keeper of Lost Children
The Foursome explores the complexities of marriage, sisterhood, and raising children at a time and place where conformity was the norm and change was just beginning to stir. Kline weaves a beautiful tapestry of love, doubt, identity, and resilience in a world that left little room for differences. I really loved this book.
If you liked The Foursome, try these:
by Dan Chaon
Published 2026
A playfully macabre and utterly thrilling tale about orphaned twins on the run from their murderous uncle who find refuge in a bizarre traveling carnival, from a master of literary horror.
by Christina Baker Kline
Published 2021
The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Orphan Train returns with an ambitious, emotionally resonant historical novel that captures the hardship, oppression, opportunity and hope of a trio of women's lives - two English convicts and an orphaned Aboriginal girl - in nineteenth-century Australia.
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Published 2020
In his boldly imagined first novel, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me, brings home the most intimate evil of enslavement: the cleaving and separation of families.
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