“How slight the difference”: Brit Bennett’s ‘The Vanishing Half’

“Eventually remembering turned into imagining. How slight the difference was between the two.”

So, this is undoubtedly one of the most critically acclaimed books of the last two years, and also generally one of the most hyped, hence my trepidation in deciding to finally embark on the journey (and still only when some of the dust had settled).

Quite apart from meeting my dizzying expectations, this book utterly atomised them. No one – and I mean no one – in all the vast reams of colleagues, friends, and foes in the publishing industry who relentlessly recommended this tour de force remotely did it justice.

It’s a masterpiece. Achingly exquisitely beautiful. So lyrical, so magnetic, and as tragic as it is transcendent. Turning each page was like amping up the gravitational pull into the ink and paper one notch at a time. It was its own singularity by the final full stop.

It also has one of the most nuanced trans characters I’ve ever read, another element all the avid recommenders had entirely failed to even mention. All I’d heard was just the briefest distillation of that famous opening premise of the twins and the town, nothing about the daughters, nothing about Reese.

I didn’t want it to end. Something I say extremely sparingly and always sincerely. The fact we get to live in a world where such stories exist…

“People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else.”