Currently fourth on the New York Times Fiction Best Sellers List, author Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half also just made an appearance at a heated auction, with seventeen bidders hoping to win the rights to the author’s recently-released novel. In the end, Deadline reports, HBO won out, making a low seven-figure deal for Vanishing, which the network reportedly plans to adapt into a limited series.
Her second novel after 2016’s The Mothers, Bennett’s The Vanishing Half follows Desiree and Stella Vignes, two sisters raised in fictional Mallard, Louisiana, a town populated exclusively by light-skinned Black people, in the Jim Crow South. Traumatized by their father’s lynching at the hands of a white mob, the pair take divergent paths into adulthood, with one sister marrying a dark-skinned Black man, and the other living as a white woman in Los Angeles. Bennett will executive produce the adaptation of her work for the network.