Jackie Kay's Trumpet, set after the death of its central character, is most of all a novel about grief and mourning and the conditions under which these can take place, and it is thereby a novel about diasporic kinship. It also returns to several themes already prominent in Kay's poetry, particularly adoption, the definition of family, and the im/possibility of being black and Scottish. Through its depiction of mourning—at times mourning interrupted or denied—it explores intimate connections and kinship bonds to both the living and the dead. The novel makes clear that kinship is performatively constituted in part through mourning, but also that both kinship and subjectivity are reshaped by mourning, the reverberations of which alter past, present and future relationships. The novel's multiple, enmeshed story lines make visible both the web of kinship, friendship and other connections in which the characters live, as well as the conditions—bureaucratic, state institutional, and medial—which shape and limit those bonds. It is through mourning and its reshaping of kinship and subjectivity that the differences and differentiations of race, gender, sexuality, nation, and citizenship become visible, and the interplay of voices in the novel enables a complex picture of the intersection of these differences in contemporary Britain—a space and society showed to be shaped by diasporic experiences, identities and aesthetics. Through an analysis of the work of mourning it becomes clear how institutional, state-recognized kinship and national heteronormativity, on the one hand, and diasporic forms of kinship, intimacy and history, on the other, intersect and influence each other in contemporary Britain.

Based loosely on the life story of a white American jazz musician named Billie Tipton, Trumpet consists of a collection of stories centred around a black Scottish trumpet player, Joss Moody. Set in the period immediately following Joss's death, the novel is narrated by or through a host of characters. Many chapters come from Joss's closest kin—primarily his wife Millie and son Colman, as well as one chapter from his bandmate and friend Big Red. These are mostly narrated in the first-person and jump between recollections of earlier events and reflections on the current situation.