Memphis focuses on the lives of four women across three generations. At the start of the novel, his ex-wife and grown-up children are spread out across America and the family has been quietly estranged for years, but his death brings them back together again and forces them to confront a multitude of family secrets. The novel opens with the death of Kweku, the long-absent patriarch of the Nigerian-Ghanaian Sai family, and chronicles all the ways Kweku’s heart fractures when he’s estranged from his immediate family. It’s an intricate and complicated story all about identity, race and expectations. Despite the different paths the twins have taken and the ways their relationship has fractured, their lives are still intertwined. The other sister secretly passes as white, and her white husband and daughter know nothing of her past. One sister eventually returns to the town she tried to escape and lives with her Black daughter.
The novel follows Stella and Desiree, identical twin sisters who run away as teenagers and go on to live totally different lives. Here are the ones that grabbed me and refused to let me go: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett I’ve encountered many incredible families that are falling apart in fiction. Instead, each person is remarkably human, doing the best they can, but often hurting each other along the way. What I love most is that there’s rarely an obvious villain. Each family member damaged the unit in their own way.įamily stories are complex and nuanced.
Instead, the choices of her husband Sam, and those of their family members all ripple outwards, combining and building over the decades until cracks are formed. In Rootless, it isn’t just Efe’s choices that cause this breakdown in family relationships.
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