The Thread: ‘The Vanishing Half’ a must-read for summer

I’ve interrupted my regularly scheduled series of “fiction in a time of isolation” for three can’t-miss, can’t-wait novels for summer.

Last week, I told you about Lawrence Wright’s eerily prescient pandemic novel, “The End of October.”

This week, I’m joining the booklover buzz for Brit Bennett’s “The Vanishing Half,” which is scheduled for a June release.

First, a bit of context about Bennett: Her debut novel, begun when she was just 17 years old, was so assured and so timely that it created a stir from the moment it was published in 2016.

Now Bennett is back with a story of identical twins who grow up in a small Southern farm town called Mallard, where nothing ever happens until the teenage twins decide to run away. “Vanished from bed after the Founder’s Day dance,” our narrator tells us, “while their mother slept right down the hall.”

Stella and Desiree’s lives take very different paths, determined by the racial identities they inhabit as Bennett delves into colorism, memory, familial relationships and American life in the 1950s and ’60s.

Bennett has said she was shocked when “The Mothers” reached readers far beyond the young black women she thought she was writing for. By now, I hope she knows how eager we all are for her next book.

This week, my Thread read for you is Brit Bennett’s forthcoming novel, “The Vanishing Half.”