THE VANISHING HALF (GERMAN RIGHTS)

THE VANISHING HALF, the next novel from the stunning National Book Award 5 Under 35 recipient and New York Times Best-Seller Brit Bennett, begins when Desiree Vignes returns to her hometown of Mallard, Louisiana, with a daughter who looks nothing like her and no husband.

No one has seen Desiree, or her identical twin sister Stella, since they disappeared from town and reappeared in New Orleans attempting to create new lives. But Stella's reinvention goes a step further: though she and Desiree are light-skinned, Stella gets a job where she passes for white and she begins to drift farther and farther away from Desiree and her identity as an African-American; Desiree feels the opposite pull and moves to Washington, D.C. before marrying a much darker-skinned man. Each twin has a child, each a daughter, but though their daughters are genetically half-siblings, they could not appear more different. Desiree's daughter has grown up in stark poverty in Louisiana, finally finding a partner who understands her in Reese, a transgender man she meets at UCLA. Stella's daughter, however, has grown up with all the privilege and luxury afforded to the only daughter of an affluent white couple and pursues a career as an actress in Los Angeles.

Destined to meet years later in California, these two generations of women push the boundaries of identity: what we can self- determine and what is thrust upon us by our families, strangers, and society at large.

Brit Bennett is the winner of both the Hurston/Wright Award in College Writing and Michigan's Hopwood Award. She was named a 2014 Zell Fellow at the University of Michigan, where she received her MFA. She is also a graduate of Stanford University, where she received the Bocock/Guerard and Robert M. Golden Thesis prizes. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times, The NYT Magazine, and The New Yorker. She is also the recipient of the National Book Award's 5 under 35 honor, and was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis as well as the winner of Lire's Meilleur premier roman étranger de l'année.