#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST * NPR * PEOPLE * TIME MAGAZINE* VANITY FAIR * GLAMOUR
2021 WOMEN'S PRIZE FINALIST
“Bennett’s
tone and style recalls James Baldwin and Jacqueline Woodson, but it’s
especially reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s 1970 debut novel, The Bluest Eye.” —Kiley Reid, Wall Street Journal
“A
story of absolute, universal timelessness …For any era, it's an
accomplished, affecting novel. For this moment, it's piercing, subtly
wending its way toward questions about who we are and who we want to
be….” – Entertainment Weekly
From The New York Times-bestselling 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.
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But
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. Many years later, one sister
lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried
to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband
knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and
just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will
happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines
intersect?
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. 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.
As 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.
