Racism, brutality and inequality still infect America, 400 years after the first enslaved Africans were brought here. Both are haunted by personal and collective traumas of the past, and the book explores whether it's possible to erase the past, in the name of a better future.įor protesters in cities across the country, the past is the present. One sister lives as a black woman, while the other passes as white. The Vanishing Half is about identical, African American, twins. She is also the author of The Mothers.īrit Bennett's latest novel is set in the late 1960s and '70s and - in the five years she was working on it - she never anticipated that when it came out it would be framed as 'timely.' ( From the publisher.Brit Bennett says it has been 'surreal' to publish her post-civil rights era book this week. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.Īs with her New York Times-bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise. Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect? Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical.īut after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities.

From the author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white.

Reviews of the vanishing half