Brit Bennett

So that's a theme in the book.

And also, just quickly, there's the recent novel by Brit Bennett called The Vanishing Half, which takes like a sister spin on the classic sort of early 20th century passing novel.

One sister decides to go white and the other doesn't.

And then they come back in this very like, it's like a real confrontation over race and presentation and all these other cool stuff.

Anybody else who you really feel like is really pushing your work forward now, whether they write in the same vein as you or not?

Um, if I'm thinking about, like, my peers, Brit Bennett's work is so important to me and will be in conversation at Books Are Magic, as I said, on the 13th of October.

The Vanishing Half, right?

Yeah, The Vanishing Half, The Mothers.

The essay also gives a great nod to contemporary inheritance novels just to prove that this genre isn't dead, and we are still obsessed with it.

It lists Philip Meyers' The Son for Texas oil dynasties, Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, tracking descendants from 18th century Ghana, Abraham Verghese's The Covenant of Water in South India, Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half, and Téa Obreht's The Tiger's Wife.

A great list.

It's absolute proof that we are still deeply obsessed with what an ancestor's compromise looks like when it manifests in a modern body.

And yeah, found so many just incredible books, incredible writers.

Um, that's how I found Brit Bennett's, um, The Vanishing Half-

Mm

... which has really stuck with me.