THE VANISHING HALF is Brit Bennett's second novel and was just released in June. The story focuses on identical twins in a southern town founded by and for light-skinned blacks. After leaving home at the age of 16, one twin eventually marries a white man, keeps her past a secret, and passes for white. Her sister marries the blackest man she has ever seen and has a daughter who looks nothing like her. This book looks beyond the issues of race and explores some of the reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

Before the Great Migration, 90% of all blacks in the United States lived in the South; after it, 47% lived someplace else. Isabel Wilkerson calls this fact "the biggest underreported story of the 20th Century". She interviewed more than 1,200 people to find three who migrated at different decades to different cities. One leaves Mississippi sharecropping to settle in Chicago after a cousin is almost beaten to death. Another is a high-school valedictorian and orange picker who leaves Florida for New York when he hears that his labor organizing has put him in danger of lynching. The third trained as a surgeon at a prestigious black college and leaves Louisiana to establish a successful practice in Los Angeles. These personal stories of migration invite us to learn and rethink the issues of the Great Migration with personal empathy.