Kayla Rae Whitaker
Returns and Exchanges
(Random House, May 2026)
One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2026
Library Journal‘s Fiction Pick of the Month
Starred review from Kirkus
Starred review from Publishers Weekly
A sweeping novel of one Kentucky family’s rise and fall throughout the 1980s—a tragicomic tour de force about love and marriage, parents and children, and the perils of mixing family with business, from the acclaimed author of The Animators
It’s December 24, 1979, just before closing at Baker-Taylor’s, and Fran (née Baker) is surveying her domain. Her husband, Fred, is charming customers in the front of the store, while last-minute shoppers in the toy aisle are fighting over the lone remaining Atari. The older Taylor kids are on register, while the younger ones’ chaos is contained to the stockroom. All is right in the world as the new decade approaches.
With four healthy children and financial stability their own parents could have only dreamed of, Fred and Fran are the picture of the American Dream—rags to riches—with a family-owned chain of successful discount department stores built on years of hard work and long hours. Underneath the surface, however, the business is changing at a breakneck pace, and each member of the family is struggling to keep up.
Money is transforming Fred, and the extremes he will go to in order to fit in with Lexington, Kentucky’s slicked-back high society crowd are embarrassing, if not downright dangerous. Oldest son Josiah wants nothing to do with the family business, Sam is seeing things that might not really be there, and Benny and Birdie are growing up with a fraction of the parenting that their older brothers did. Meanwhile, Fran, her family’s stable core, is falling for Wendy, a cashier at Baker-Taylor’s, risking everything along the way. While trying to maintain the facade of a perfect success story, Fred and Fran learn that in matters of love and money, once it’s gone, it’s gone—no returns, no exchanges.
Praise for Returns and Exchanges
“Whitaker has written a sprawling, extravagantly intelligent novel about people quietly breaking free from constraints—marital, gender, class. Here, as in her widely admired debut novel, The Animators (2017), she’s attuned to working people’s lives and to the idea that professional ambition may be the purest reflection of character…Superb. Like a blue-collar Franzen novel.” — Kirkus, starred review
“Whitaker expertly juggles the expansive cast of characters and elicits sympathy for all of them even when they exhibit the worst parts of themselves. It’s an openhearted epic of the American dream and the bargains struck to achieve it.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Whitaker writes a deeply compelling novel that follows a family over two generations. Hand to readers who have an interest in family stories, strong women, and lesbian and gay fiction.” — Library Journal, starred review
“This is the novel I’ve been missing: a sprawling, emotional and true family saga. I picked it up knowing nothing about it and fell completely in love with the characters, the story, the setting. All of it. It’s damn near perfect.” – Ayelet Waldman, NYT Bestselling author of Love and Treasure
“Wildly ambitious and deeply satisfying, Returns and Exchanges is a new kind of great American novel. Kayla Rae Whitaker deftly animates the ambitions and desires of a family on the rise, painting each character with a hard-eyed compassion that makes it impossible not to root for all of them, even as they break each other’s hearts again and again. This novel is smart, funny, loving, and utterly beautiful. I didn’t want it to end.” — Erin O. White, author of Like Family
“My favorite thing about Returns and Exchanges is it’s different, distinctive, absolutely packed with characters, relationships, times, and places not often told. But Kayla Rae Whitaker’s singular story is also timely and telling, sprawling and resonant, familiar and grand. It’s no small thing to craft a family saga that somehow feels new and ageless all at once, but Whitaker manages it with verve and grace.” — Laurie Frankel, author of This Is How It Always Is and Family Family
“Kayla Rae Whitaker is one of contemporary fiction’s most astute, empathetic chroniclers of all the messy complexities that make us human. With a heart so strong you can hear it beat on the page, Returns and Exchanges deftly explores the price of ambition as one family grapples with the weight of its own success.” — Grant Ginder, author of The People We Hate at the Wedding
“In Returns and Exchanges, the Baker-Taylors discover what it truly takes to build and preserve a legacy—not just in business, but in love. A tender, funny, and sharply observed story about the complicated promise of the American Dream and what it takes to hold a family together.” — Heather Aimee O’Neill, author of The Irish Goodbye
“Ambitious and engrossing, written with sympathy, insight, humor and style.” — Susan Rieger, author of Like Mother, Like Mother
Kayla Rae Whitaker is a graduate of the University of Kentucky and New York University. Her first novel, The Animators, was named a best book of the year by Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and BookPage. She lives in Queens, New York.