Next of Kin

A Memoir

De: Gabrielle Hamilton

Narrado por: Gabrielle Hamilton

An electrifying memoir about the demise of a singular family—a stunning new book by Gabrielle Hamilton, author of the New York Times bestseller and James Beard Award winner Blood, Bones & Butter

“You won’t be able to put down Gabrielle Hamilton’s story of the excitement, resilience, agony, and defiance required to be a member of her family. She doesn’t mess around.”—Ariel Levy, author of The Rules Do Not Apply

“We were a family veined through with certain brutalities, rifts, and unresolved conflicts, as well as some remarkable violences and some decades-long silences. But together we had rituals, systems, congruent cohering events that made us who we were as one. I thought of the black and blue marks as if they were the desirable spores of mold found in noble cheeses.”

The youngest of five children, Gabrielle Hamilton took pride in her unsentimental, idiosyncratic family. She idolized her parents’ charisma and non-conformity. She worshipped her siblings’ mischievousness and flair. Hers was a family with no fondness for the humdrum.

Hamilton grew up to find enormous success, first as a chef and then as the author of award-winning, bestselling books. But her family ties frayed in ways both seismic and mundane until eventually she was estranged from them all. In the wake of one brother’s sudden death and another’s suicide, while raising young children of her own, Hamilton was compelled to examine the sprawling, complicated root system underlying her losses. She began investigating her family’s devout independence and individualism with a nearly forensic rigor, soon discovering a sobering warning in their long-held self-satisfaction. By the time she was called to care for her declining mother—the mother she’d seen only twice in thirty years—Hamilton had realized a certain freedom, one made possible only through a careful psychological autopsy of her family.

Hamilton’s gift for pungent dialogue, propulsive storytelling, intense honesty, and raucous humor made her first book a classic of modern memoir. In Next of Kin, she offers a keen and compassionate portrait of the people she grew up with and the prevailing but soon-to-falter ethos of the era that produced them. A personal account of one family’s disintegration, Next of Kin is also a universal story of the emotional clarity that comes from scrutinizing our family mythologies and seeing through to the other side.

©2025 Gabrielle Hamilton (P)2025 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“You won’t be able to put down Gabrielle Hamilton’s story of the excitement, resilience, agony, and defiance required to be a member of her family. She doesn’t mess around. In her singular, lyrical style, Hamilton has given us nothing less than an exploration of death, love, and the meaning of life.”—Ariel Levy, New York Times bestselling author of The Rules Do Not Apply

“Gabrielle Hamilton has crafted a shimmering and achingly beautiful exploration of family—those bonds that forge us, the secrets that define us, and the what-ifs that haunt us long after we think we’ve moved on. Tender yet unflinching, she reveals how the people we’re born to remain woven into the fabric of who we become, whether we welcome that inheritance or not. This is a book that will burrow deep into your heart and stay there, the way family does.”—Michael Hainey, New York Times bestselling author of After Visiting Friends

“Gabrielle Hamilton’s Next of Kin is piercing, horrifying, and perversely gorgeous, to name a few of its more prominent attributes. It charts, with almost murderous precision, the myriad ways in which family and fate collide. One rarely gets to use the word “profound,” under any circumstances. In its acumen, in its fullness of emotion, in the stunning ferocity of its prose, Next of Kin is profound.”—Michael Cunningham, New York Times bestselling author of The Hours and Day

Stunning memoir

Heartbreakingly raw and honest. A tour de force of a memoir equal parts a reflection on family dysfunction and reckoning.

Not a story I had hoped for...

I have idolized Gabrielle Hamilton and her writing since I read her first book Blood, Bones & Butter in July 2012... I listen to her read it once a year. She is one of my favorite authors. This book wasn't quite what I expected. I don't think I have the right to expect anything of her really... I just hoped she'd share more of the sweet relationship with her sons... more how her relationship with her husband came to a close and maybe how her latest started. Where was the sweetness that was a prized part of that first book? I can't find it.. The writing is always great but where is the story? and the relatable moments where she reached in the freezer for a coke and it burned going down or when she ate a simple boiled potato abroad and it fed her like nothing else... I miss this person.. she always picked up her babies when they cried in the night... someone I feel like I knew and who I really wanted to catch up with... I read this book and I still miss her.
This book is mostly about her brother Jeffery and how and why he committed suicide... The details are pretty graphic at times...