The Vanishing Half: Shortlisted for the Women's Prize 2021

She studied the illness desperately, as if understanding it would make any difference. It didn’t, of course.

She wondered, foolishly, if she might feel her grandmother’s presence somehow. But she felt nothing and that was worse.

This river, like all rivers, remembered its course.

Here was the backward story: the present and its tedium receding, all those doctor visits, the endless pills, the strange man shining lights in her eyes, the television programs she could never follow, the daughter watching her, rising each time Adele lifted out of her chair, any time Adele tried to go anywhere. She found herself in the strangest p

It personalized death, the faculty said, it restored dignity to the undignified process of dying.

strong hurricane could flood the cemetery, the old caskets swinging open, filling with brown water. Some gravedigger rooting through the mud for gold watches and diamond rings, marveling over his good fortune, would step over bones, not knowing the difference.

The shows seemed like the perfect form for her. Each day, the stories inching forward, but at the end of the week, the world essentially unchanged, the characters exactly who they had always been.

Her memories ebbing and flowing like the tide.

He understood. In spite of himself, he did. Maybe that was the only way his parents could’ve dumped him. If they’d told him goodbye, he would’ve hollered, clinging to their legs. He would’ve never let them go.