Publication Date: May 12, 2026
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Christina Baker Kline comes a boldly original reimagining of an astonishing true two sisters in nineteenth-century North Carolina—Kline’s own distant relatives—who married world-famous conjoined twins from Siam.
When Chang and Eng 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 Addie sees in the twins’ fame a chance to reclaim her future. Sallie, 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 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.
As soon as the Siamese Double Boys set foot on American soil, news spread of the infamous conjoined twins.
Author Christina Baker Kline transports readers back to North Carolina in the 1840s in The Foursome. This richly detailed reimagining of a true story of conjoined twins who married sisters is narrated by Sarah Yates, the older of the two sisters.
Connected by a band of flesh below their ribs, Eng and Chang Bunker manage to gain entrance into the Wilkes County community, where they eventually offer marriage to Sarah and Adelaide Yates.
As the narrator, Sarah’s struggle to share both a marital bed and a household with her sister highlights only a handful of the many adjustments required. Eventually, Adelaide gets a new house, and the brothers split their time between the two locations.
Over the course of five decades, the group grew to include 21 children between the two couples. Love, loss, betrayal, and regret, coupled with a country on the brink of war, impact the families in unexpected ways.
Grounded in research, with details drawn together by imagination, the author illustrates how themes such as race, gender, and social status evolve throughout the story and impact the characters.
The Foursome delivers a multifaceted story of two brothers determined to have families of their own despite their physical limitations, and of the sisters who took on the challenge to make it work.
A #1 New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including The Exiles, Orphan Train, and A Piece of the World, Christina Baker Kline is published in 40 countries. Her novels have received the New England Prize for Fiction, the Maine Literary Award, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Award, among other prizes, and have been chosen by hundreds of communities, universities and schools as “One Book, One Read” selections. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in publications such as the New York Times and the NYT Book Review, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Psychology Today, and Slate.
Kline was born in Cambridge, England, and raised there as well as in the American South and Maine. She is a graduate of Yale, Cambridge, and the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in Fiction Writing. She has taught fiction and nonfiction writing, poetry, English literature, literary theory, and women’s studies at Yale, NYU, and the University of Virginia, and served as Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University for four years. She is a recipient of several Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowships and Writer-in-Residence Fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Kline lives in New York City and Southwest Harbor, Maine with her husband, David Kline. They are the parents of three sons, Hayden, Will, and Eli.
