Jan 7

Jan 7 A really good read - Girl, Woman, Other

If you’re a stickler for punctuation, you may balk at the free-flowing, almost poetic, style and layout of Bernadine Evaristo’s Booker Award winning novel. But don’t let it put you off. Because once you get used to it - which you will more quickly than you think - you’re in for a rare treat.

This fizzing, warm, sad, funny, insightful book charts the lives and stories of 12 black women, weaving their experiences into a captivating canvas of what it means to be black, and other in different ways, in today’s world.

The women’s stories, each explored in separate sections, are self-contained and yet also intertwine in different, sometimes unexpected ways. These are flawed, complex, complicated, loveable characters and their richly imagined lives reflect struggles and joys we can all relate to, and many that will be unfamiliar, whilst giving a compelling insight into modern day black experience.

Bernadine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other

The first woman we meet is Amma, a radical, feminist, lesbian playwright preparing for the opening night of her latest play at the National Theatre. Then there’s Yazz, her formidable, defiant daughter, fathered by her dapper, gay writer and media commentator friend, Roland. Next we’re introduced to Dominique, Amma’s lifelong ally and collaborator, whose infatuation with her new, ultimately controlling, lover leads her to move to, and eventually escape from, a lesbian commune in America.

Shirley is an initially idealistic teacher whose gradual disillusionment with her chosen profession is saved by her passion for identifying and helping her more talented pupils. Among them is Carole, who, having been gang-raped as a teenager, has doggedly turned her life around to become a banker and is married to a white man. Her schoolfriend LaTisha has three children by three different fathers and works in a supermarket, where she started as a sullen shelf-stacker and has become a responsible supervisor.

We encounter 93 year old Hattie at the farm she has lived on all her life and which she ran with her African-American serviceman husband, Slim, until he died, but which is now becoming increasingly ramshackle. Her children and grandchildren include Megan/Morgan who self-identifies as gender free and has become a social media influencer and activist

Of all the women, Penelope, a middle-class, twice-divorced foundling - she was discovered on the steps of a church and adopted by a childless couple who revealed her history to her on her 16th birthday - seems rather the odd one out. Until an Ancestry DNA test weaves her in with other characters in an unexpected way, which gives the book its heartwarming finale and reflective final lines (reproduced in the written style and layout of the whole book)

“this is not about feeling something or about speaking words

this is about being

together”