The Foursome is about the lives of Chang and Eng Bunker, the conjoined twins from Siam (now Thailand) for whom the term “Siamese Twins” was named. They were real people and this novel is about their real lives with their wives, Sallie and Addie, who were sisters from the North Carolina town where the Bunkers settled in the mid-1800s. However, in this novel, their story is made robust with fiction from the creative mind of Christina Baker Kline.
The novel is told from Sallie’s point of view. The first quarter of the novel provides sufficient background to explain how she and her sister met the Bunkers and why they made the unusual decision to marry conjoined twins. This was an extremely necessary part of their story. I thought Kline handled the, undoubtedly, fraught decision for the girls realistically, including the unfavorable opinions of the their parents and their community.
The novel went on to describe how they managed to construct their married days and nights; how the personalities worked, and didn’t work, together; how they set up the house and farm; how their sex lives worked; and how their lives altered as a multitude of children arrived. These are the things that most people probably wonder about when they hear that Chang and Eng were married. Reading this section sometimes felt like intruding on a spectacle, reading between fingers spread across the eyes.
In the back end of the novel, the tone changed as Sallie faced reality regarding troublesome situations about which she’d previously been compliant. She began to be the driver of her own life and began making small changes that were within her power. The twins ended up fathering 21 children with their wives and died on the same day. Sallie’s perspective on slavery was enlightening and the book acknowledged that her family, as slave-owners in North Carolina, had to make changes after the Civil War.
I had previously read three of Kline’s novels, one of which—Orphan Train—achieved a 5-star rating from me which is a rare achievement. So when NetGalley offered the chance to read this new novel from her before its release date, I jumped at the chance. In the Author’s Note at the end, I was surprised to learn that Kline is related to Sallie and Addie! They are her ancestral cousins. She did a great job with this story, making it not as much like a soap opera as it could’ve been in another author’s hands.
Thank you to Kline, NetGalley, and Mariner Books for allowing me to read this galley ahead of The Foursome’s release date of May 12, 2026.
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