World Book Club Folgen

This month, in the next in our season celebrating The Exuberance of Youth, we talk to American writer Brit Bennett about her unputdownable novel, The Vanishing Half.The Vanishing Half charts the rollercoaster parallel lives of estranged twin sisters who choose to live in two very different worlds - one black and one white.Stella and Desiree are identical twins, growing up together in a small, Southern black community. Until, at age sixteen, they run away. Decades later, still separated by many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?Weaving together multiple stories and generations of one family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Bennett has produced both a riveting, emotional family drama and an unforgettable exploration of the American history of passing as White.(Picture: Brit Bennett. Photo credit: Emma Trim.)

Next in the series exploring The Exuberance of Youth World Book Club talks to the award-winning American author Ben Lerner about his beguiling debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station.Brilliant, unreliable, young American poet Adam Gordon is on a fellowship in Madrid, where he is struggling to establish his identity and dazzle his contemporaries.Instead of studying, his research becomes a meditation on authenticity - are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain, especially the two clever and beautiful women he falls for, as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? In the aftermath of the 2004 Madrid train bombings has he participated in history or merely watch it pass him by?Winner of the Believer Book Award and a Guardian Book of the Year from 2012 which marked the launch a major new literary talent.(Picture: Ben Lerner. Photo credit: Catherine Barnett.)

In this year-long celebration of The Exuberance of Youth, World Book Club revisits the multi-prize-winning debut novel Homegoing by the acclaimed Ghanaian author Yaa Gyasi.The story of two half-sisters, separated by forces beyond their control: one sold into slavery, the other married to a white slave-trader, Homegoing traces the generations of family who follow, as their destinies lead them through two continents and three hundred years of history. A novel of remarkable sweep and power, with each character’s life indelibly drawn, Homegoing reveals the devastating legacy of slavery and the resilience of the human spirit.(Picture: Yaa Gyasi. Photo credit: Peter Hurley/Vilcek Foundation.)