In a crowded London pub, two young people meet. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists—he a photographer, she a dancer—and both are trying to make their mark in a world that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. More about this book >

• HONOREE 5 Under 35 2021 >

  Selected by Brit Bennett >

  Brit Bennett

  

  Brit Bennett was born and raised in Southern California, graduated from Stanford University, and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction. In 2014, she received the Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller. Her second novel The Vanishing Half was a #1 New York Times bestseller and Longlisted for the National Book Award. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.