Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. 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. The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. She was hurrying, her head bent, and-Lou paused here, a bit of a showman-she was holding the hand of a girl.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. Her hipless body reminding him of a branch caught in a strong breeze. She looked exactly the same as when she'd left at sixteen-still light, her skin the color of sand barely wet. But that morning in April 1968, on his way to work, Lou spotted Desiree Vignes walking along Partridge Road, carrying a small leather suitcase.

In that little farm town, nothing surprising ever happened, not since the Vignes twins had disappeared. The barely awake customers clamored around him, ten or so, although more would lie and say that they'd been there too, if only to pretend that this once, they'd witnessed something truly exciting. The morning one of the lost twins returned to Mallard, Lou LeBon ran to the diner to break the news, and even now, many years later, everyone remembers the shock of sweaty Lou pushing through the glass doors, chest heaving, neckline darkened with his own effort. 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. 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.

The vanishing half author