Best-selling author Brit Bennett is following the success of her critically-acclaimed debut, "The Mothers," with a "The Vanishing Half," a novel exploring the American history of racial passing. She joins CBS News' Errol Barnett to discuss how the story, which opens in 1968, is particularly timely today. Bennett also shares her reaction to J.K. Rowling's controversial statements on transgender women and how the trending #PublishingPaidMe has uncovered inequities within the publishing industry.

The US author on topping the bestseller charts with her new novel, why being right is overrated, and the TV show bringing her joy in lockdown

The novel holds parallels to what we’re seeing now: Touching on the period of the civil rights movement, it follows two twins from a town in Louisiana who choose to “pass” as different races. Bennett tells Wake-Up Call what readers should look for in the book.

The Rumpus spoke with Bennett about her second literary triumph, in a conversation that dives deep into the effects of colorism, writing about shame, and avoiding body as a metaphor.

The best-selling author talks to Shondaland about her new novel, "The Vanishing Half," which explores the complications of family, race, and the ties that bind.

The New York Times bestseller (whose latest book will be adapted into an HBO series) reveals her story inspirations and how "categories of race are not as clear and stable as we often believe them to be."

Touching on themes of race, identity, love and empathy, “The Vanishing Half” is an elegant multi-generational portrait of the deep fissures within a family cleaved by the choices twin sisters — Desiree and Stella — make when they break away.

The novelist Brit Bennett hears her mother recall a rumor from her childhood in the Jim Crow South about a town inhabited entirely by light-skinned Black people. Though she tried for years, Bennett has never been able to locate the exact town her mother describes. But whether this place exists is almost irrelevant, because, like any myth, its specter embodies the material anxieties of that era. This was the genesis of Bennet’s latest novel, The Vanishing Half.

Brit Bennett's latest novel is set in the late 1960s and '70s and — in the five years she was working on it — she never anticipated that when it came out it would be framed as "timely."

To the novelist, whose newest book touches on racial unrest in the 20th century, something feels different about this moment.

In her propulsive new novel, The Vanishing Half, which debuted at the top of the New York Times best-seller list, Bennett takes the theme she explored in that essay to a startling new place.

“The Vanishing Half” (Riverhead), the second novel by Brit Bennett, tells the story of the Vignes sisters’ diverging paths. In doing so, it belongs to a long tradition of literature about racial passing.

Bennett, 29, turned that anecdote into a scene in her second novel, “The Vanishing Half” (Riverhead, June 2). It’s one of many stories the California-born Bennett has inherited that have formed her impression of Palmetto — current population: less than 200 — as “a kind of mythical place.” The sort of place that, like many insular Creole communities, looms large in its residents’ psyches even long after they’ve left.

In ‘The Vanishing Half,’ her follow-up to 2016’s breakthrough novel ‘The Mothers,’ the 29-year-old novelist expresses an unlikely affinity: “I just love a severe older woman.”

Bennett’s book, which is also “GMA’s” June Book Club pick, topped the New York Times bestseller list and has been selling out on Amazon.

“I’m interested in just telling stories that are interesting and engaging and hopefully will make you feel something deeply and think deeply.”

“The Vanishing Half,” a critically acclaimed novel about identity and race, is on track to become not just one of the bestselling books of the year, but a 352-page cultural phenomenon.

Warner Bros. has optioned Brit Bennett’s debut novel The Mothers, with Kerry Washington producing under the Simpson Street Banner.

Back when her novel was different, before it was a New York Times best seller and a story about a secret, Brit Bennett got her first fan. She’s young now, 26—a fact that no one can believe, because her book feels so much older—but she was even younger then, 18, maybe 19. She was in a creative writing class her freshman year of college and she needed a short story to workshop. “I’m not a short story writer at all,” Bennett told me.

Instead, she pulled a scene from the novel she’d already been working on for more than a year, wrote it from the perspective of a girl with a deep, dark secret, and handed out copies to her class. One of her classmates admitted the next week in workshop that she’d become so engrossed in the story that she missed her stop on the train.