What's Mine and Yours

A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!

An instant New York Times bestseller!

A USA Today bestseller!

Named a Best Book of 2021 by Amazon • Esquire • Marie Claire • Refinery29 • Kirkus • Redbook • Ms. Magazine • The Millions • Undomesticated Magazine • Paperback Paris

"A once-every-few-years reading experience."—Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes

"Coster portrays her characters’ worlds with startling vitality. As the children fall in lust and love, grapple with angst and battle the tides of New South politics, Coster’s writing shines"—New York Times Book Review

From the author of Halsey Street, a sweeping novel of legacy, identity, the American family—and the ways that race affects even our most intimate relationships.

In the Piedmont of North Carolina, two families’ paths become unexpectedly intertwined over twenty years. Jade and Lacey May are two mothers determined to give their children the opportunities they never had. After a harrowing loss, Jade wants to hand down the tools her son, Gee, will need to survive in America as a sensitive young Black man. Meanwhile, Lacey May, having left the husband she loves, strives to protect her three half-Latina daughters from their charming father’s influence.
 
When a county initiative draws students from the largely Black east side of town into a predominantly white high school on the west, each mother stands on different sides of the integration debate. Gee meets Lacey May’s daughter Noelle during the school play, and their families begin to form deeply knotted, messy ties that will shape the trajectory of their adult lives. And their mothers make choices that will haunt them for decades to come.
 
What’s Mine and Yours is an expansive yet intimate multigenerational tapestry of motherhood, identity, and the legacies we inherit. It explores the unique organism that is every family: what breaks them apart and how they come back together.

• “At its heart, What’s Mine and Yours is a coming-of-age story—one that examines the unraveling of marriages, complexities of siblinghood and reckonings with parents… Coster portrays her characters’ worlds with startling vitality. As the children fall in lust and love, grapple with angst and battle the tides of New South politics, Coster’s writing shines."
  New York Times Book Review
• “The complex characters will stay with you—maybe even change you.”
  People
• “Coster’s remarkable characters, each one of them authentically flawed and gorgeously realized, propel this wise and loving story ever forward, making for a graceful meditation on family, inequality, and the ties that bind.”
  Esquire
• "Coster is an exacting observer but also an endlessly generous one… It’s the individual moments that are exquisite, each chapter a tiny snapshot of a whole world. Tender but—miraculously—never sentimental."
  Kirkus (Starred Review)
• "What's Mine and Yours is a once-every-few-years reading experience for me. I was completely seduced by the honesty of Coster's prose, the tenderness she has for her characters. To say Coster pulls off something special here is a massive understatement. I've placed this novel on a shelf among those most dear to me, and I imagine I'll return to it many, many times."
  Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes
• "Coster balances the tender and the sharp moments shared between families better than anyone else writing."
  Elizabeth Acevedo, National Book Award winner of Poet X
• “What’s Mine and Yours is both intimate and sweeping: an exploration of many kinds of love, the repercussions of long ago decisions, and the burdens of personal and political history. I loved this novel.”
  Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling author
• "What's Mine and Yours explodes with love, passion, and their piercing aftermath. Naima Coster renders two unforgettable families, their labyrinthine bonds and heartaches, with propulsive and startling clarity. This is a novel of scorching beauty."
  Patricia Engel, author of Infinite Country
• "Coster… depict[s the characters] complex situations and moral ambiguities with depth and compassion. Weaving numerous plot threads — miscarriages, abortions, divorces, brain tumors, benders—into an intricate tapestry, Coster shows, as one of her indelible minor characters declares, that 'It's only our life if we say so. Otherwise it belongs to them.'"
  Minneapolis Star Tribune
• "What’s Mine and Yours is a lyrical, universal story about home, reminiscent of the works of Jacqueline Woodson and Tayari Jones."
  Atlanta Journal-Constitution
• “Rare is the book that manages to be both a finely wrought character study as well as a multi-family saga…but Naima Coster's new novel does just that — and more. Coster writes with a singular sensitivity and nuance."
  Refinery29
• “What's Mine and Yours is powerful and unfailingly generous, a story of two families you won’t be able to forget. Marvelously profound and moving.”
  R.O. Kwon author of The Incendiaries
• "Moving fluidly between perspectives and time, What's Mine and Yours is a mesmerizing story of two families brought together through choice and circumstance in one North Carolina town. Naima Coster is a storyteller of astounding clarity and compassion."
  Lisa Ko, National Book Award finalist of The Leavers
• "What's Mine and Yours is a book about parents who try and fail and then try again. An extraordinary cast of characters, nuanced and full of insight. It's about children who hold their loved ones accountable. It reveals in absolutely engrossing and tension-filled prose how a tragedy haunts a family. Coster is a master storyteller through and through. Read this book."
  Angie Cruz, author of Dominicana
• "What's Mine And Yours is a powerful and timely family saga about the complex webs forged by love and tragedy - gripping, generous, and deeply felt. It's a moving examination of what we inherit, and what it means to love both wholeheartedly and imperfectly. This is a book, in other words, for anyone who's ever had a family."
  Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin
• "Naima Coster's What's Mine and Yours patiently and unerringly tracks the boundaries, unearths the secrets, and stares unblinkingly at what's essential to knowing oneself and the larger histories we're forced to navigate. A beautifully-wrought investigation of family, race, inheritance, and belonging."
  Cristina García, author of Here in Berlin and Dreaming in Cuban
• Naima Coster's What's Mine and Yours moves from moment to moment of startling grace. This expansive, generous novel tackles big themes - systemic racism, the reverberations of gun violence, class inequity - but it always feels thrillingly personal. Multiple times, it moved me to tears. An exquisite and vital portrait of family, place, and the bonds that transform our lives, What's Mine and Yours is more than a beautiful read - it's an essential one, destined to be talked about for years to come as a book that saw the world and spoke the truth with tenderness, wisdom, and love."
  Julie Buntin, author of Marlena
• "Through its flawed and flawlessly crafted ensemble cast, Naima Coster's What's Mine and Yours shows us how a single tragedy ripples through two families and a community already on the edge. Crisscrossing time, states, and the Atlantic Ocean, Coster explores the complexities of marriage, race, and family ties in this engrossing and deftly woven novel."
  Melissa Rivero, author of The Affairs of the Falcóns
• "Naima Coster weaves a beautiful tapestry of voices together in What's Mine and Yours. This is a sprawling, moving narrative about the messiness of love and family, mothering, race, and community. Here we follow two families connected by place and circumstance as they try to free themselves of those bonds. The result? Rich, complex individual stories that merge to form a satisfying, startling end."
  Crystal Hana Kim, Author of If You Leave Me
• "Naima Coster is definitely a writer to watch. Her clear-eyed writing interrogates race, class, and family in a refreshing and thoroughly engaging way. A lovely and thoughtful book."
  Jacqueline Woodson, author of Red at the Bone and National Book Award winner (praise for Halsey Street)
• “Coster’s remarkable characters, each one of them authentically flawed and gorgeously realized, propel this wise and loving story ever forward, making for a graceful meditation on family, inequality, and the ties that bind.”
  Redbook