Cambridge Edition August 2020 - WEB

BOOK CLUB

CAMBRIDGE EDI T ION

BRINGING YOU TOP NEW FICTION PICKS, AUTHOR INTERVIEWS, DISCOUNTS AND LOTS MORE BOOK CHAT, THE EDITION BOOK CLUB IS A PARTNERSHIP WITH CAMBRIDGE LITERARY FESTIVAL AND HEFFERS

t isn’t a surprise that The Vanishing Half currently sits on bestseller lists. The second book from American author Brit Bennett, following her successful debut The Mothers , was always going

to be a literary event – but a novel about sisters and family and the intimate, unbreakable connections between those who know each other best has resonated particularly deeply during a time when we’ve all been isolated from our loved ones. The tale follows identical twin sisters Desiree and Stella Vignes as they grow and make life choices with unforeseeable consequences. As black women born and raised in an isolated American backwater called Mallard, where lightness of skin is cruelly prized by the all-black community over seemingly everything else, they survive extraordinary childhood trauma and escape to the big city at the age of 16 – where Stella is mistaken for a white woman and steps into a new life, leaving Desiree to make her own way. Decades pass until a chance connection between their daughters sees the two sisters’ paths cross again: but can the countless lies and deceptions be overcome? The book opens with Desiree’s return to Mallard in 1968, holding her eight-year- old, dark-skinned daughter Jude by the hand. News spreads like wildfire through the town, and people speculate about the young family’s reasons for turning up: it’s revealed that Desiree is escaping an abusive marriage and is moving home to her mother, Adele Vignes. “Maybe they should have gone somewhere new, started over fresh. But it was too late now for regrets.” Bennett’s epic story then moves seamlessly forward and backward in time between the sisters’ childhood and Desiree’s return. We meet Early Jones, a manhunter sent to find Desiree by her furious husband, and watch as the young woman learns to experience her hometown with a

WORDS BY CHARLOTTE GRIFFITHS

THE VANISHING HALF BY BRIT BENNETT

necessary to calmly guide readers through the storylines, all webbed with well-meant deceit and sticky layers of falsehoods. As a young woman, Stella tested the limits of the controlling, racist system several times by stepping into white-only shops and museums, concluding: “there was nothing to being white except boldness. You could convince anyone you belonged somewhere if you acted like you did.” But when you’ve played a part for an entire lifetime, as the older Stella has amongst her white husband’s family and the all-white, homeowners’ association-run community where they live in Los Angeles – maybe “acting for that long ceased to be acting altogether”. This older Stella actively avoids black people, heeding her mother’s words that “we always know our own”, afraid of

missing half. As a child, it was Stella who depended on her bolder sister for strength and support: the reverse would seem to be true as adults, with Desiree’s youthful determination and grit seemingly tempered by the “world’s immeasurable cruelties” that her mother attempted to conceal from the twin sisters. As Early observes: “the key to staying lost was to never love anything.” Yet when family ties run that deep, staying lost proves an impossible feat for the protagonists: whether by chance encounter or, faced with no alternatives, confronting one’s past head on. Bennett’s sparse but compassionate style shimmers on the page: her descriptive passages read like the reassuringly trustworthy opening of news reports, impartially relaying the truth of events –

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