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GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER

by Bernardine Evaristo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 2019

Beautiful and necessary.

A magnificent chorus of black British voices and a winner of the 2019 Booker Prize.

“Amma / is walking along the promenade of the waterway that bisects her city, a few early morning barges cruise slowly by.” These are the opening lines of Evaristo’s eighth novel. The unexpected line breaks, the paucity of punctuation and capitalization: These stylistic choices are, at first, disorienting—and that makes perfect thematic sense. Amma is a black woman, a lesbian, and a fiercely feminist playwright who is gaining mainstream attention after decades of working on the margins. Each of the 12 characters Evaristo conjures here have had to work hard to make a place for themselves in a culture that regards them as outsiders even if they’ve lived in the United Kingdom their entire lives. Instead of forcing her creations to code-switch to make their lives comfortable for general consumption, Evaristo compels the reader to accommodate and adjust. The rewards for this tiny bit of mental labor are extraordinary. There is no overarching story, but the lives of these women and one "gender-free" character intersect in revelatory ways. For example, Shirley is both one of Amma’s oldest friends and the teacher who helps Carole work her way out of a council flat and into Oxford. For Amma, Shirley grew from being “the only other brown girl” on the playground to being the straight-laced friend who always supported her unconventional career—and loaned her money when necessary. For Carole, Shirley is “Mrs King,” the no-nonsense taskmaster who only cared about her when her grades were perfect. When she takes center stage herself, we discover that Shirley is both of these people and much more. As she creates a space for immigrants and the children of immigrants to tell their stories, Evaristo explores a range of topics both contemporary and timeless. There is room for everyone to find a home in this extraordinary novel.

Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-8021-5698-3

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Black Cat/Grove

Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019

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Bernardine Evaristo Shares Booker Prize with Atwood

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Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2015

Kirkus Prize winner

National Book Award Finalist

A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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by Hanya Yanagihara

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen ) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

More by J.D. Salinger

RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS AND SEYMOUR

by J.D. Salinger

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Girl, Woman, Other: A Novel

By Bernardine Evaristo
Reviewed by Robert Allen Papinchak
November 5, 2019

This Man Booker winner boasts an astonishingly vibrant, layered narrative.

Look no further than Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other for the most distinctive novel of the year. Co-winner (along with Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments ) of the 2019 Man Booker Prize, it is its own testament to the resplendent lives of 12 resilient women in a very modern Britain.

Begin by ticking off the boxes: the unique prose/poem style that borders on the edge of free verse; diverse characters with significant stories to tell; and a structure that pulls the reader in immediately, seizing both the intellect and the emotions as the narrative unfolds. It is like reading Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and James Joyce simultaneously.

Each of the women has a chapter to herself. (And, in one case, themself.) Best to start with the catalogue of characters, three in each of four chapters. There is Amma, Yazz, and Dominque; Carole, Bummi, and LaTisha KaNisha; Shirley, Winsome, and Penelope; and Megan/Morgan, Hattie, and Grace. Through a series of linked stories, the 12 form a sort of Venn diagram of intersecting, sometimes overlapping accounts of their herstories.

At the center is Amma Bonsu, a black, lesbian, socialist playwright in her fifties. The reader first encounters her “walking along the promenade of the waterway that bisects her city.” She is on her way to the opening night of her play “The Last Amazon of Dahomey” at the National Theater in London.

It has been a long, circuitous route. For many years, she and her closest friend, Dominique, have taken no prisoners at theatrical productions they’ve deemed insufficient. Amma has “spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbing hand grenades at the establishment that excluded her.” She and Dominique believed in “protest that was public, disruptive and downright annoying.”

Her play will be an explosive breakthrough career movement unlike anything ever before seen on stage. It will be reviewed as “groundbreaking, astonishing, moving, controversial, original” — almost like Evaristo’s novel — as it pays homage to the “fearless ferocity” of women warriors, giving classical events a modern relevance.

Amma and Dominique co-founded the Bush Women Theatre Company, which “captured their intentions/they would be a voice in theatre where there was silence/black and Asian women’s stories would get out there/they would create theatre on their own terms/it became the company’s motto/On Our Own Terms/or Not At All.”

The motto might just as well have been the mantra for their lives. Their plays were performed in community centers, libraries, at women’s festivals and conferences. They produced a monthly Bush Women samizdat, launched at Sisterwrite, that only lasted two issues due to “pathetically poor sales.”

Amma produced a daughter, Yazz, born “nineteen years ago in a birthing pool in [her] candlelit living room/surrounded by incense, the music of lapping waves, a doula and midwife” and her gay friend Roland, the first Professor of Modern Life at the University of London, who had agreed to father the child.

That child, Yazz, though cut from the same cloth as her mother, disavows old-fashioned feminism for being a “humanitarian, which is on a much higher plane than feminism.” She aspires to be a “journalist with her own controversial column in a globally-read newspaper because she has a lot to say and it’s about time the whole world heard her.”

She is the prime mover in her “uni squad” that includes a “privileged princess,” who pays for a lawyer for a classmate who was raped, and another who is “developing a female Somali superhero/who hunts down men who hurt women/and castrates them, slowly/without anaesthetics.”

At the play’s opening, Yazz sits in a seat “chosen by her Mum in the middle of the stalls, one of the best in the house” just as the curtain is about to go up.

Dominique, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to be attending the premiere. She has moved to America to be with Nzinga, a Texan who soon proves to be controlling. They live in Spirit Moon, a “wimmin’s” commune, and take on new names until another member helps Dominique escape Nzinga’s “wrath, unreasonableness, and general animosity” and ferrets her away to West Hollywood.

The novel’s second triumvirate of character studies — Carole and Bummi Williams, and LaTisha KaNisha Jones — represents a trio seeking success. Carole’s morning mantra is, “ I am highly presentable, likeable, clubbable, relatable, promotable and successful .”

Her achievements have not come easily. She and her mother, Bummi, lived in council flats until a teacher, Shirley King (Amma’s oldest friend), recognized Carole’s math skills and encouraged her to assimilate out of her class, gaining a position at Oxford. That leads to employment in the “orbit of equities, futures and financial modeling.”

Bummi, a child of well-educated Nigerians, has her own degree in math. She begins as a domestic but soon becomes chief executive of BW Cleaning Services International. Her first client is a wealthy, retired schoolteacher, Penelope Halifax, who (like Shirley) reappears in a later section of the book. Bummi and Carole make personal choices that bring them “new life.”

LaTisha, a school friend of Carole’s, “crawls her way out of the horror movie of her teenage years,” has three children by various men, and begins “climbing the giddy heights of retail supremacy.” By the time she is 30, she has become a supermarket supervisor despite what Shirley and Bummi expected of her.

Shirley, Winsome Robinson, and Penelope form the group in part three. Shirley, a history teacher, arrived at Peckham School for Boys and Girls in the “multicultural neighborhood” with a double mission: to “make history fun and relevant ” and to be “an ambassador/for every black person in the world.” She considers Carole her “first and greatest achievement.”

Winsome has precarious ties with both Amma and Shirley. Having spent her “working life standing on the open platform of a Routemaster bus,” she dismissed Shirley’s “tough life [with]…excellent health, cushy job, hunky husband, lovely daughters and granddaughter, good house and car, no debts, free luxury holiday in the tropics every year.”

Now in her eighties, Winsome loves to entertain and is an especially expert cook. But she also has a bombshell secret she’s cooked up for Shirley.

Neither is Penelope’s life as it seems. Shirley’s colleague at school, twice divorced, she has suffered through a “Tyrannosaurus Brute who believed in the superiority of the male species” and a “Le Creep” psychologist whose “benevolent probing had a tendency to turn into intrusive interrogation.” She “loathed that feminism was on the descent” and championed petitions at work for both the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act.

The last set of women — Megan/Morgan, Hattie, and Grace — is related by blood. Their section, like the others, functions as a biography of the characters. Just as Yazz defines herself as “humanitarian,” Megan/Morgan (part Ethiopian, part African-American, part Malawian, part English) is the one nonbinary person who identifies as “gender-free,” a pansexual with a long-term trans-female partner.

As a media critic, the first review of Amma’s play is Morgan’s: “OMG, warrior women kicking ass on stage! Pure African Amazon blackness. Feeeeerce! Heart-breaking & ball-breaking! All hail #AmmaBonsu #allblackhistorymatters.”

Hattie is Megan/Morgan’s 93-year-old great-grandmother. She tends to the Rydendale family farm and acreage in northern England. She is also the keeper of “wicked family secret[s].”

Morgan often helps Hattie with chores. Grace, an Abyssinian, is Hattie’s deceased mother. Her story, set in the 1920s, recounts a life of many sorrows, including the deaths of her young children. Her lineage holds one of the most significant, jaw-dropping revelations of the novel.

The final part, “The After-party,” brings the narrative full circle when the curtain comes down on Amma’s play. Many of the women — including a surprise, last-minute arrival — reappear as if it were an encore with spotlights on their intertwined lives.

Superlatives pale in the shadow of the monumental achievement of Girl, Woman, Other . Few adjectives suffice. It’s hard not to overpraise this brilliant novel. Evaristo’s verbal acrobatics do things language shouldn’t be able to do. It’s a Cirque du Soleil of fiction.

Readers should put down whatever book they’re reading and immerse themselves in this one. Bernardine Evaristo is the writer of the year. Girl, Woman, Other is the book of the decade.

Robert Allen Papinchak is a former university English professor whose reviews and criticisms appear in numerous newspapers, magazines, literary journals, and online.

Support the Independent by purchasing this title via our affliate links: Amazon.com Or through Bookshop.org

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Girl, Woman, Other

Bernardine evaristo.

453 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 2, 2019

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Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (book review) – “a breathtaking symphony of black women’s voices”

I’m not sure why I bought “Girl, Woman, Other” during a late night shopping spree at the local English bookstore . I loved the cover, that’s for sure. I also vaguely remembered that it was recommended as being similar to “Homegoing” by Yaa Gyasi , a book I loved. So I simply bought it. No expectations, no strings attached.

Girl, Woman, Other in a nutshell

“Girl, Woman, Other” tells the stories of 12 Black British women, aged 19 to 90+. It is an interesting blend of diverse experiences with focus on the leitmotif of identity – personal, cultural, and artistic. The book also covers themes such as feminism, politics, racism, relationships and sexuality.

The selling point for me, though, is the inter-connectedness of stories. Each chapter illustrates the story of a woman, and through each story we also meet other women from the book, seen through different lens.

Overall impression

I enjoyed a lot reading this “Girl, Woman, Other”! What I liked most is the wide range of diversity and the high intensity of human experiences that Evaristo put together in the stories. Take a look at these examples of life paths illustrated in the book:

study at Oxford and become an investment banker
live a simple life on a farm
be a transgender activist
write plays and be a theatre director

Quite an interesting variety, right?

Back in 2017 I wrote a post about diverse books where I argued that the diversity level depends a lot on the person reading it. A book that is diverse for a Canadian girl might not be diverse for a boy born in China. Well, “Girl, Woman, Other” is a diverse book for me, as 90% of the experiences illustrated in the book are totally out of my bubble.

Fusion fiction

When I first opened the book I had a shock – the whole text was written like a poetry! Was I going to read a 400+ pages long poem? Not really. The book is written in prose using many line breaks. Evaristo calls this type of prose “ fusion fiction ” – a writing style that “ pushes prose towards free verse, allowing direct and indirect speech to bleed into each other and sentences to run on without full stops ” ( London Review of Books, 2019 ).

It took me around 15-20 pages to get used to the writing style, but after that it got me hooked on. Despite the lack of full stops, most sentences are fragmented, so the reader gets a visual hint about the end of the sentence. It’s not like the stream of consciousness style where you have a whole page full of text, without any punctuation mark.

The Adinkra symbols

Evaristo does not only play with written words, but also with illustrated African wisdom. Each chapter starts with its title (usually the name of the woman) and a traditional Adinkra symbol. Adinkra symbols have a twofold purpose: enriching from a visual point of view, as decoration, and conveying a message of wisdom.

This puzzle put together by the writer is quite witty. For example, the symbol on the first page of the book – Funtumfunafu – (on the left in the image below; you can also see it in the book picture above) refers to “ the cultural ideals to uphold unity in diversity “. Another example is Obi-nka-obi – “to ensure harmony in a hierarchically structured chieftaincy system” ( Philip Owusu, 2019 ).

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14 thoughts on “ Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (book review) – “a breathtaking symphony of black women’s voices” ”

Thanks for explaining the significance of the Adinkra symbols! I’m ashamed to admit, I didn’t pay too much attention to those, when reading the book. Excellent review, I am so glad you enjoyed it. I haven’t read Homegoing, but it sounds interesting as well. 🙂

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Regarding the symbols, I also paid little attention at the beginning! After a while I thought it must be more than just nice design, but I did not research too much (eg meaning of symbols) because I was afraid of spoilers 😁 So the post-reading research was more insightful!

Great review! I’ve heard so much about this one. However I sampled the writing style (from which I can tell if I will get on with a book or not) and decided the style wasn’t for me.

It’s great that you tried a sample to see how the writing style fits you. I went totally “blind” when buying the book, which was a bit risky …

I’m adding this to my TBR. Thanks for posting this review.

Happy to hear, I hope you’ll enjoy it! Looking forward to reading your impressions! 😀

This was a great review! I don’t think I ever read fusion fiction, but I am really intrigued by this book and everyone keeps recommending it that I need to read it now!

I hope you will enjoy it! I was a bit skeptical at the beginning because I did not enjoy the stream of consciousness style (and I think fusion fiction has similarities), but it is much more “readable” from my point of view.

I read the first few pages after having heard so many good things about the book, but the writing style put me off. It reminded me too much of the stream of consciousness technique which I’m not a huge fan of. Your review is really encouraging though, maybe I’ll give the book another try sometime. 🙂

I was a bit skeptical at the beginning especially because I did not enjoy the stream of consciousness style, but after reading few pages it all came natural. I look at it also as a long poem – there are so many separate lines that it does not get to long paragraphs that are difficult to follow. Maybe you’ll give it another try! 🙂

Great review

Thank you! 🙂

I really, really enjoyed this book. Definitely one of my top 3 I read in 2019. I might even read it again and look up the Adinkra symbols now that I know 🙂

It is an amazing book, and the symbols add an interesting Sherlock-feeling 🙂 Thanks for stopping by!

Booker Prize winner Girl, Woman, Other is an essential novel of race and gender: Review

A surprise co-winner of this year’s Booker Prize (she shares it with Margaret Atwood , only the third time that’s happened in the award’s 50-year-history), Bernardine Evaristo may not be a household name, but Girl deserves every accolade, and more: Her sixth novel is a creative and technical marvel — a sprawling account of 12 interconnected females (some young, some old, one non-binary; hence the title) in modern-day Britain.

Radical lesbian playwrights and fierce nonagenarian homesteaders; glossy-haired bankers and ground-down cleaning ladies; rebellious teenagers and retired housewives: They all come together in a book so bursting with wit, empathy, and insight, it can rarely pause to take a breath, let alone break a paragraph (or at least put a full stop at the end of one).

Nearly all of the protagonists in its wildly kaleidoscopic survey of nearly a century of womanhood are black or brown, living out their lives on the less-visible fringes of England’s technically invisible but still intransigent caste system.

But their paths ahead are hardly circumscribed by race or class or color: Amma is the playwright, long proudly anti-establishment, who gets the opportunity to put on a piece at the very center of bourgeois London theater; Yazz is her teenage daughter by donor sperm, an extravagantly self-aware millennial with a multi-cult squad she calls the Unf*ckwithables; financial officer Carole’s sleek figure and streamlined apartment defy her origins in public housing, her Nigerian mother — and most importantly, the brutal sexual assault that defined her adolescence.

Other indelible characters, all plugged into Evaristo’s ever-expanding web, come and go within Girl ‘s pages, each one immediately, recognizably human but still somehow far from archetype. Maybe the book’s most ingenious trick, though, is that its reflections on race and feminism hardly ever feel like polemics; there’s just too much pure vivid life on every page. A–

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I’ve been a huge fan of Margaret Atwood’s work for a long time. So when I saw that --- in a ground-breaking decision --- her latest novel, THE TESTAMENTS, shared this year’s Man Booker Prize with Bernardine Evaristo’s GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER (which at the time was not even available in the United States yet), I was intrigued and couldn’t wait to pick it up. After having the opportunity to read it, I’m pleased to report that not only does it offer a fierce feminist perspective to rival Atwood’s own, it also is written in a bold, lyrical style that will both challenge and surprise readers, myself included. I can’t wait to read more by this writer.

The framing story of GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER centers on the opening night of a play written by one of the novel’s central characters, Amma, whose life story is the first one explored in the narrative. Amma is a mother, a creative, a charismatic figure in London’s lesbian scene, and her story is just the first of 12 profiles of a diverse, fascinating group of women whose lives comprise this book.

"...simultaneously delightfully character-driven, powerfully observant and deeply empathetic in its portrayal of the lives of women of color and the century of circumstances that have shaped and been shaped by them."

These characters include Amma’s college-age daughter, Yazz, who’s intent on proclaiming her wokeness, as well as Amma’s long-time creative partner, Dominique, whose narrative focuses on her emotional abuse at the hands of another woman. As the novel progresses (its 12 profiles are grouped into sets of three more closely linked characters), the connections spiral further outward, but all come back --- directly or tangentially --- to that opening night play. The characters are diverse in age, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender identity and class. They fall in and out of love, endure painful relationships and establish healthy ones, give birth and suffer loss, and establish and redefine connections --- with one another and with the other men, women and children in their lives.

Younger readers, in particular, may be surprised to discover the extent to which --- as Evaristo brilliantly illustrates --- the concerns and joys of today’s younger generation have always been part of the fabric of women’s lives already. As GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER suggests, however, the great gift of the past 20 years or so is the opportunity for their stories --- and countless more both like and unlike them --- to come out into the open and be recognized. “We should celebrate that many more women are reconfiguring feminism and that grassroots activism is spreading like wildfire and millions of women are waking up to the possibility of taking ownership of our world as fully-entitled human beings,” one character proclaims near the novel’s end.

Throughout, Evaristo’s prose is written almost like poetry, in short sections that inventively utilize surprising line breaks and unorthodox capitalization and punctuation to generate a breathless reading experience that ranges from painfully raw to joyfully profound. GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER is simultaneously delightfully character-driven, powerfully observant and deeply empathetic in its portrayal of the lives of women of color and the century of circumstances that have shaped and been shaped by them.

Reviewed by Norah Piehl on December 6, 2019

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

Publication Date: November 5, 2019
Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
Paperback: 464 pages
Publisher: Black Cat
ISBN-10: 0802156983
ISBN-13: 9780802156983

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Girl, Woman, Other

by Bernardine Evaristo

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A sprawling patchwork of stories from a varied ensemble of characters, Girl, Woman, Other explores marginalized identities and the intricate and often uncomfortable ways people navigate them.

As we meet Amma, a 50-something playwright finally experiencing mainstream success in Bernardine Evaristo's Booker Prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other , her thoughts flow over the page in a poetic form littered with frequent line breaks and lacking standard punctuation. At first glance, this might seem like a challenge posed to the reader, a work that might be labeled as "modern" or "experimental." If Evaristo's novel is experimental, though, it's been rigorously tested and is well out of the trial phase. This book is genuinely readable in the purest sense. Characters' speech, ruminations and backstories blend together naturally, proceeding in a version of the off-the-cuff style many of us write in daily as we text or tweet messages that roll out by their own logic, making complete sense to us even if they don't follow traditional formatting. The author has harnessed the easy expressiveness of this style and applied it to a polished and complex narrative. Within the novel's digestible casing are the stories of 12 distinct characters, most of whom are Black British women. In addition to Amma, who takes us through her early days of feminist politics and promiscuity, we meet her 19-year-old daughter Yazz, socially progressive in her own way but eager to develop language and beliefs distinct from her mother's. We also encounter Amma's erstwhile business partner Dominique, and learn of a difficult past relationship she had with an African American woman from which it took her years to recover. Amma's childhood friend Shirley recalls her own long struggle as a teacher for underprivileged children, while a prize student of Shirley's, Carole, shares the traumatic adolescence she suffered and how this led to her determination to pursue a successful career at all costs. Some of the characters are bound to one another in ways that aren't always made clear to us—or them—upfront. In fact, discerning who's related to whom makes up what loose semblance of a plot exists in Girl, Woman, Other . For a book that glides with such majesty on its characters' individual stories, any intentional attempt to tie them together might seem heavy-handed. But along with Amma's play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey , which draws many of the characters together for its opening night, the mystery surrounding certain familial relationships exists naturally inside of the novel's broad focus on community of all kinds. Within this focus, we see the power that both reunification and forming new connections can have, even when these processes initially feel awkward and jarring. Evaristo's novel contains plenty of uneasy moments. Some of these have to do with trauma sustained from assault and abuse, but the author also has a knack for portraying a specific type of discomfort that occurs in political discussions. Morgan, a non-binary character seeking a broader understanding of their gender with the help of strangers on the internet, tries to hold a dialogue with a trans woman who they simultaneously clash with and are drawn to. Yazz, at university, tries on a variety of views surrounding topics of racial and class privilege, feminism and identity. In one instance, a white girl named Courtney shuts down Yazz's assertion that, as a Black person, she's "more oppressed than anyone who isn't" by citing Roxane Gay, resulting in an interaction that makes both girls seem naive:

...Yazz, I mean, where does it all end? is Obama less privileged than a white hillbilly growing up in a trailer park with a junkie single mother and a jailbird father? is a severely disabled person more privileged than a Syrian asylum-seeker who's been tortured? Roxane argues that we have to find a new discourse for discussing inequality Yazz doesn't know what to say, when did Court read Roxane Gay - who's amaaaazing? was this a student outwitting the master moment? #whitegirltrumpsblackgirl

I was initially uncomfortable with how relatively unchecked this moment goes, even with the very youthful vibe between the characters, wondering if some people might read it as Courtney really having schooled Yazz. It seems fine for Courtney to challenge Yazz's comment, but she does this by cherry-picking language from Gay's actually much more complex ideas about race and privilege to move the spotlight off herself. Evaristo doesn't exactly go out of her way to show this, but it's also hard not to read the above passage as intentionally ridiculous. Also, in the next section, Courtney adds that she "only fancies black men" and will lose at least 50% of her white privilege by having mixed-race children. At this point, it's obvious that the author is making fun of Courtney just as much as, if not more than Yazz, while also allowing readers to consider whether there may still be some legitimacy to the relatively unformed opinions of both. This sense of humor that's more expansive than reductive continues to accompany awkward moments throughout Girl, Woman, Other . I also came to feel that discomfort (the characters' and my own) was part of the point of this reading experience and that, to borrow a phrase from a social media platform the novel both references and stylistically resembles, retweets don't equal endorsements. Thoughts and opinions are produced with such spontaneity and plurality, and over such a wide span of time and experiences, that it's impossible not to encounter some that are cringe-worthy. Again, though, this is just part of the nature of Evaristo's book. It's about the actuality of getting from Point A to Point B without always having all of the necessary tools and language, whether from a loveless marriage to a fulfilling relationship, or from internalized misogyny to self-acceptance. Even in its title, Girl, Woman, Other makes it clear that the author's intention is to address specific experiences of marginalization. It's refreshing to read a book that encompasses such a variety of human perspectives and flaws but that still unequivocally centers Blackness, non-male genders and queer sexualities, as well as non-traditional relationships and family arrangements. While Evaristo's novel entertains many points of view, it doesn't stumble into moral vagueness or the idea that all opinions and experiences are the same. Instead, it chooses motion over stagnation, self-awareness over denial. It insists on pushing through discomfort and moving forward.

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Beyond the Book: Bernardine Evaristo's Booker Prize Win

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A New York Tate of Mind

Jul 8, 2020

Review: Girl, Woman, Other

Updated: Dec 18, 2023

Girl, Woman, Other , by Bernadine Evaristo (2019)

There's something beautiful and unique about the way this book is both an overarching look at the history of Black women in Britain, and the similarities that tie them all together, while also being incredibly specific in it's depictions of each individual Black woman, and what makes them different.

Girl, Woman, Other is a tale of 12 Black, British women of different ages, cultural backgrounds, social statuses, gender identities, etc. - "from a lesbian playwright to a jaded schoolteacher to a non-binary social media influencer." Each chapter contains three sub-chapters, each of which tells the story of one of these women. For example, chapter one includes the stories of Amma, her daughter Yazz, and her friend Dominique. Each chapter's three women are related to one another in some way, and for a while that seems to be where the connections stop - within each chapter of three. But the further you get the more you see that all of these women are connected. The characters cross paths in different ways, and you begin to learn more about the earlier ones via other characters' stories. I loved how each of the women's lives unfolded in this way. Not only do you, as the reader, get more information as you go along to help round out each character, but also, with each new character you gain new perspectives of previous ones.

At the end I found myself wishing there was some kind of map to trace who knows who, and how... but if this existed in the book and a reader looked at it first, that would ruin a lot of the intricate work done to introduce the connections slowly.

Race and gender are important topics in Girl, Woman, Other, as the text explores what it means to be Black, what it means to be African &/or British, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be all of these things and Queer. Evaristo examines these questions (and many more) with the understanding that a.) the answers will always vary from person to person - there is no universal truth in what it means to be who you are, and that b.) humanity is universal.

I saw this great quote from the author in an interview:

Underpinning all my work is the assertion, “We are here and this is who we are.

And who we are is a myriad of things and not necessarily what you expect.”

It would be remiss of me not to also mention the writing style, which Evaristo calls "fusion fiction." The text is a mixture of prose and poetry, with almost no periods to end sentences, capital letters to begin them, or quotation marks to show dialogue. The sentences are free-flowing, and line-breaks abound. For the first chapter or so I found it a challenge to follow, but after that I got used to it. I think it's an interesting style choice, but feel a bit thick in admitting that I don't really understand the point. But that's probably just because I am a grammar stickler.

Another interesting fact that I only learned after I finished the book - each chapter and sub-chapter begins with a different Adinkra Symbol . Originating from the Asantes of Ghana, these visual symbols have historical and philosophical significance, and were originally printed on cloth worn by Asante royals, as well as on pottery, and as wall art. I compiled the symbols and then researched the meanings for each one, to see how they related to each person/chapter. Some meanings are straightforward, being quite easy to connect to the character (either sincerely or ironically), once you know them. Others are a bit more of a puzzle. I don't think my list will give anything away if you have yet to read the book, but I put it at the very end of this review, in case you want to skip it.

Finally, if you are interested in hearing a discussion about the book (before or after reading it - doesn't matter), I'd suggest you check out Writers & Books ' new series "Ampersand Talks Books," with staff member Clara O'Connor! The first episode covers Girl, Woman, Other , in a discussion with W&B teacher Almeta Whitis .

2019 Booker Prize

Twenty-five Book of the Year and Decade honours

Barack Obama 's Top 19 Books for 2019, and Roxane Gay 's Favorite Book of 2019

Best Fiction Book at the 2020 British Book Awards

Shortlisted for The Women's Priz e

UP NEXT: The Yellow House , by Sarah M. Broom

...........................................................................................................

Title page - Funtunfunefu Denkyemfunefu: "Siamese crocodiles," a symbol of democracy & unity

Amma - Okodee Mmowere: "The Talons of the Eagle," a symbol of strength, bravery, & power

Yazz - Duafe: "Wooden Comb," a symbol of beauty & cleanliness

Dominique - Nkonsonkonson: "Chain Link," asymbol of unity and human relations

Carole - Akoben (variation): "War Horn," a symbol of vigilance & wariness

Bummi - Denkyem: "Crocodile," a symbol of adaptability

LaTisha - unsure if this one is:

Bi Nka Bi: "No One Should Bite the Other," a symbol of peace & harmony

or Kwatakye Atiko: "Hair Style of an Asante War Captain," a symbol of bravery & valor

Shirley - Wawa Aba: "Seed of the Wawa Tree," a symbol of hardiness & perseverance

Winsome - Kete Pa: "Good Bed," a symbol of a good marriage

Penelope - Akoben (variation): "War Horn," a symbol of vigilance & wariness

Megan/Morgan - Sesa Woruban: "Change/Transform Your Character," a symbol of life transformation

Hattie - Dwennimmen: "Ram's Horns," a symbol of humility together with strength

Grace - Osran Ne Nsoromma: "The Moon and the Star," a symbol of love, faithfulness, & harmony

Epilogue - Kojo Baiden: "Rays," a symbol of the cosmos & omnipresence

I used the following website to find the symbol meanings: http://www.adinkra.org .

Book Reviews

Girl, Woman, Other

In Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo traces the histories of 12 different characters in the U.K. over more than 100 years. With each new woman comes a distinctive perspective on feminism, race and class. There’s Amma, whose taste of mainstream success as a playwright and theater director prompts her to question whether she’s betrayed her anti-establishment roots; Carole, who tries to hide her working-class, immigrant background from her peers at an elite university; and Morgan, a non-binary hero worshipped by a legion of online fans. While the stories within it are largely self-contained, Evaristo’s Booker Prize-winning novel (an award shared this year with Margaret Atwood ) layers the women’s voices to offer piercing insights into black British female identity across generations.

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Bernardine Evaristo’s ‘Girl, Woman, Other’ received half a Booker Prize, but it deserves all the glory

If the best thing a literary prize can do is spark lively discussion, this year’s Booker Prize was a stupendous success. Two weeks ago, the judges of England’s most prestigious literary contest broke their own rules and split the $63,000 award between Canadian superstar Margaret Atwood and Anglo-Nigerian writer Bernardine Evaristo. In England, that tweedy violation has sparked a level of debate that would erupt in America if the World Series ended in a tie.

Yes, it was an unwise decision — probably a misguided effort to contort half the award into a lifetime achievement prize for Atwood while allowing the other half to recognize a truly fine novel by Evaristo. But enough . The fact is, despite its clumsy process, the Booker Prize has done a great service: Its self-induced controversy has given an astonishingly creative, insightful and humane writer the worldwide attention she has long deserved. Evaristo’s “Girl, Woman, Other,” available next week in the United States, is a breathtaking symphony of black women’s voices, a clear-eyed survey of contemporary challenges that’s nevertheless wonderfully life-affirming.

Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo share the 2019 Booker Prize

Although the novel’s structure sounds daunting, “Girl, Woman, Other” is choreographed with such fluid artistry that it never feels labored. The story begins just hours before the debut of a play at the National Theatre in London, and it ends 450 pages later as the audience spills into the lobby. But during that brief window of time, Evaristo spins out a whole world. Novella-length chapters draw us deep into the lives of 12 women of various backgrounds and experiences. There’s nothing forced about the virtual exclusion of white characters from this novel; they have simply been shifted to the periphery, relegated to the blurry sidelines where black characters reside in so much literary fiction written by white authors.

The complex movements of this large group could easily have overwhelmed all but the chess masters among us, but Evaristo doesn’t shove us into the whole crowd at once. Instead, we meet these women in a series of elegantly layered stories. Young and old, some become rich, most are struggling along. A few are embittered, while others are full of hope. They fall in love with men and women, and they challenge the limits of that binary structure. They rise from a vast palette of racial and national backgrounds stretching from Northern Europe to Africa. Some, particularly the older ones, worry about their heritage being washed away in the insistent flow of white culture. As the novel progresses, their connections accrue gradually, allowing us moments of understanding spiked with surprise. Together, all these women present a cross-section of Britain that feels godlike in its scope and insight.

Central to this cast of characters is Amma, a bold, feminist playwright finding unexpected renown in her 50s. She had “spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbing hand grenades at the establishment that excluded her,” Evaristo writes, “until the mainstream began to absorb what was once radical and she found herself hopeful of joining it.” With a swirling production called “The Last Amazon of Dahomey” about to open a sold-out run at the National, Amma is anxious and proud, thirsty for acclaim but wary of the inevitable compromises.

In a sense, Evaristo has imagined into being one of the possible trajectories of her own life. In the early 1980s, passionate about acting but unable to find work, she co-founded a theater company for black women — the first in Britain. Although fiction rather than theater became the focus of her career, like Amma, she has produced a number of highly inventive feminist works that explore the function of race. And now, in a most delightful coincidence, both author and protagonist have been propelled to a whole new level of fame.

Amma is the Big Bang of “Girl, Woman, Other,” from which the universe of this novel expands in all directions. Her only child, Yazz, is a sardonic 19-year-old riding a fresh wave of sexual politics that regards her mother’s feminism as embarrassingly antique. Evaristo notes that Yazz has a unique style: “part 90s Goth, part post-hip hop, part slutty ho, part alien.” Hypersensitive to hypocrisy (in others), Yazz is quick to mock her mother’s newfound wealth one moment and wheedle for spending money the next. Her college girlfriends draw us down other avenues of England’s complex racial metropolis.

Meanwhile, the opening of the play reminds Amma of her old friend, Dominique, and their time in the Bush Women Theatre Company, a group once determined to produce work “on their own terms.” In those early days, Dominique became enthralled with “a teetotal, vegan, non-smoking, radical feminist separatist lesbian housebuilder” who lectures all their friends on “the racial implications of stepping on a black doormat rather than over it, of not wearing black socks (why would you step on your own people?), and don’t ever use black garbage bags.” She eventually lures Dominique away to a “wimmin’s commune” called Spirit Moon, a place vaguely reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s “Paradise.”

With the passage from gentle empathy to steely realism to wry satire, one marvels at the dimensions of Evaristo’s tonal range. “Girl, Woman, Other” is a novel so modern in its vision, so confident in its insight that it seems to grasp the full spectrum of racism that black women confront, while also interrogating black women’s response to it.

But just as crucial to this novel’s triumph is Evaristo’s proprietary style, a long-breath, free-verse structure that sends her phrases cascading down the page. She’s formulated a literary mode somewhere between prose and poetry that enhances the rhythms of speech and narrative. It’s that rare experimental technique that sounds like a sophisticated affectation but in her hands feels instantly accommodating, entirely natural. It’s just the style needed to carry along all these women’s stories and then bring them to a perfectly calibrated moment of harmony — a grace note that rings out after the orchestral grandness of “Girl, Woman, Other” draws to a perfect close.

Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com .

Review: “Blonde Roots,” by Bernardine Evaristo

Girl, Woman, Other

By Bernardine Evaristo

Black Cat. 452 pp. Paperback, $17

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The Literary Edit

Girl Woman Other Book Review

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo had been on my reading pile for months by the time I finally got around to reading it. Like many people, I had watched in bafflement when the Booker judges made the notorious decision to award the 2019 prize to both Evaristo and Atwood – a choice that broke the rules implemented in 2019 which stated that only one author could be crowned winner. And while the decision to throw out the rule book and anoint two winners rather than the usual one was met widely with outrage, both authors took the verdict in their strides.

My good friend David Wade – who I met when working on the Women’s Prize for Fiction in London, but who now lives in Sydney – had long said it was one of his favourite books, and so, when planning forthcoming events for The Bondi Literary Salon , I decided to choose Girl, Woman, Other for our February book club pick. A book that proved so popular that we held two concurrent events, I finished it the day before interviewing Kate Mosse for my podcast – during which we discussed the controversial Booker win.

My biggest concern prior to reading Girl, Woman, Other was that I would find the writing style somewhat jarring. Known – and loved by many – for its ‘fusion fiction’, the absence of full stops and the long sentences, it’s not a style I always enjoy (my intense dislike for Ulysses being a case in point), but I loved it from the moment I started reading.

A tale that follows the lives of twelve women in contemporary London, Girl, Woman, Other is not only a nuanced look at the vignettes that make up each of the character’s lives, it too is an intimate and insightful exploration of the black British experience.

A vibrantly depiction of a contemporary Britain that is not often found in the pages of a book, Girl, Woman, Other fuses a powerful feminist narrative with a disregard for the normal conventions of punctuation, and deeply rhythmical prose. The characters are broad and beautifully flawed, coming as they do from a variety of backgrounds, ages, roots, class systems, occupations, families and sexual preferences. The book explores race, identity and class, and it looks at the struggles forced upon minorities as they navigate living in a society so dominated by white power and fragility. Evaristo seamlessly weaves a tapestry of women’s lives together, all of which centre around what it is to be black, and too, what it is to be female.

An accessible, vivid and vibrant book that offers a voice to the untold stories of black women – both in the UK, and in the wider world as a whole – Girl, Woman, Other is a poetic and prose-rich tale that is profoundly moving, powerful and poignant and should be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand more about class, about race, and ultimately, about humanity.

Buy Girl, Woman, Other from Bookshop.org , Book Depository , Waterstones , Amazon or Amazon AU .

Girl Woman Other Summary

Teeming with energy, humour and heart, a love song to black Britain told by twelve very different people.

Twelve very different people, mostly black and female, more than a hundred years of change, and one sweeping, vibrant, glorious portrait of contemporary Britain. Bernardine Evaristo presents a gloriously new kind of history for this old country: ever-dynamic, ever-expanding and utterly irresistible.

Bernadine Evaristo Author Bio

Bernardine Evaristo is the author of Lara, winner of the Emma Best Book Award in 1999, The Emperor’s Babe and Soul Tourists. She is a former Poet in Residence at the Museum of London, and her work has been widely anthologized. She won a prestigious Arts Council Writers Award in 2000.

More Bernadine Evaristo Books

Other Berndine Evaristo books include: Blonde Roots, Mr Loverman, Hello Mum, Soul Tourists and The Emperor’s Babe.

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Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo review – joy as well as struggle

The interconnected stories of a group of black British women raise timeless questions about feminism and race

B lack women’s stories have long been misread as something they are not. It is hard to write fiction without being asked: is this story about you? And does this singular tale represent the collective black female experience? Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other turns a subtle side-eye to both questions, and makes answering them an impossible task.

Her eighth novel follows 12 characters, most of them black British women, moving through the world in different decades and learning how to be. Each character has a chapter; within the chapters their lives overlap, but their experiences, backgrounds and choices could not be more different. There’s Amma, a lesbian socialist playwright, and non-binary Morgan, who uses the internet to navigate their gender identity – but also Shirley, a teacher who feels alien in Amma’s community, and Winsome, a bride who has arrived from Barbados to an unhappy marriage. Many of the characters are close – friends, relatives or lovers – while others simply visit the same theatre on the same night, or argue with each other on Twitter.

Living within a patriarchal society presents challenges that unite many of us. Amma is concerned with what it means to be politically pure, or to “sell out”, while another character, Carole, chases mainstream success in the world of banking. Other questions raised in the novel feel urgent yet timeless: how can a woman incorporate a relationship with a man into her feminist life? Should we show anger towards those who “get it wrong” – even if from a position of ignorance? Whose guidance should I follow? That dispensed by my mother, my university, my partner, my peers, my feminist heroes? Which bonds will last?

Feminists have always grappled with certain problems, such as commercialisation: “the media’s obsession with beautiful women is nothing new, look at Gloria, Germaine and Angela in their youth”. Evaristo weaves these struggles into dialogue without reducing her speakers into mouthpieces for a popular debate. Some of her conversations feel naive (who is the “most” privileged, and is there a sliding scale anyway?), but they are nonetheless conversations that many of us have had. Others are contentious – one character creates a trans-exclusionary festival – but they’re tackled sensitively. We are also shown where political discourse can fail us, such as through emotional manipulation in a lesbian relationship: “only a black woman can ever truly love a black woman”.

Evaristo, whose previous books explore heritage, the African diaspora and modern life, wrote these intergenerational stories over a six-year period. There are echoes here of her 2009 verse novel, Lara , with the prose at times feeling more like poetry, stripped of capitalisation and punctuation: “while dancing / for herself / out of it / out of her head / out of her body / feeling it / freeing it / nobody watching”. The pace is tightly controlled, and women’s bodies and the way they’re presented arise again and again as motifs, with details including a sequinned hijab, bare feet, an apron and a string of pearls all imbued with significance.

Each storyline brings the reader round to a position of empathy. The characters are flawed and complex, for example Bummi, the immigrant parent who would rather her child did anything but bring home a white partner; and later, an affair that perhaps represents the worst way one woman can betray another. When each section ends, we leave with a new perspective.

There is no overarching story, but to be racialised as black brings with it some level of connectedness. As a result, there is something unconditional about the relationships here – the protagonists support each other, and are often forgiving and gentle. From finding family through DNA testing, to wanting to mentor other women of colour, to the possibilities offered by safe spaces – by the novel’s close, Evaristo has illustrated the drive for togetherness.

Girl, Woman, Other is about struggle, but it is also about love, joy and imagination. The book culminates with her protagonists – black women of different generations, faiths, classes, politics and heritages, and a few men too – thrown together at a party for a soap opera-style grand finale. Evaristo’s world is not idealised, but there is something uniquely beautiful about it. The core group holding the party together are a non-traditional family – Amma and Roland are queer parents, while Yazz, their formidable, defiant daughter with the unruly afro, bobs about the room. For many readers, it’s not a familiar world – this is a Britain less often depicted in fiction. But that certainly doesn’t mean it’s not a world that is possible, and worth celebrating.

Bernardine Evaristo

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Girl, Woman, Other Book Club Questions & Discussion Guide

Bernardine Evaristo won the 2019 Booker for Girl, Woman, Other , the first Black woman to do so. And if it annoys you that, in the last 20 years, women have only won the Booker 7 times, then I’m sure you were able to appreciate the feminist thread in Evaristo’s book.

(Hey Booker, you can do better.)

Girl, Woman, Other lays bare complicated feminist themes as well as issues of multiculturalism, gender roles, gender fluidity, Lesbian life and painful multi-gen family dynamics. There is certainly no shortage of things to discuss here and our Girl, Woman, Other book club questions will help you get the conversation started.

This discussion guide starts with the publisher’s book synopsis. Did you find it an accurate description of your experience with the book? If not, why?

Following that, move along to our 10 Girl, Woman, Other discussion questions and check out some selected (and thought provoking) reviews of the book.

Then, if you liked the book, we mop up by recommending three books with similar themes.

(This article contains affiliate links. This means that if you choose to purchase, I’ll make a small commission.)

Girl, Woman, Other Book Synopsis

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

Girl, Woman, Other is a magnificent portrayal of the intersections of identity and a moving and hopeful story of an interconnected group of Black British women that paints a vivid portrait of the state of contemporary Britain and looks back to the legacy of Britain’s colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean.

The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her Black lesbian identity; her old friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades of work in London’s funding-deprived schools; Carole, one of Shirley’s former students, is a successful investment banker; Carole’s mother Bummi works as a cleaner and worries about her daughter’s lack of rootedness despite her obvious achievements. From a nonbinary social media influencer to a 93-year-old woman living on a farm in Northern England, these unforgettable characters also intersect in shared aspects of their identities, from age to race to sexuality to class.

Sparklingly witty and filled with emotion, centering voices we often see othered, and written in an innovative fast-moving form that borrows technique from poetry, Girl, Woman, Other is a polyphonic and richly textured social novel that shows a side of Britain we rarely see, one that reminds us of all that connects us to our neighbors, even in times when we are encouraged to be split apart.

10 Girl, Woman, Other Book Club Questions

Evaristo uses punctuation in the title, but then makes spare use of it within the book. There is often a lack of periods and commas, but question marks and dashes seem to be in rotation. Did you notice the lack of punctuation? What do you think Evaristo was trying to do with that choice?
The book also jumps through time and between different character stories. How did you find the format? Were you able to follow the threads?
There is a vast amount of multiculturalism happening in the book. The characters are from St Lucia, Nigeria, Barbados and Malawi with Afro-Guyanese mothers, half caste’s from Aberdeen, the Egyptian Elite and a Somali Muslim. These women are so very not the stereotypical British white bread. What did those different points of view tell you about current British demographics and culture?
There is a lot of multigenerational tension happening in the book. Each generation has a different point of view regarding feminism, gender roles, sexuality and culture. How does this play off between the characters, such as between Amma and her daughter Yazz, Megan/Morgan and her mother Harriett, between Bummi and Carole and so on?
Yazz’s mother Amma “…wondered if she really was still being brainwashed by white society, and whether she really was failing at the identity she most cherished- the black feminist one.” What are some of the ways that you saw Amma (or any of the other characters) working hard at her/their identity as feminists of color?
Shirley’s mother Winsome launches an interior critical dialogue about Shirley, who she considers “…never satisfied with what she has: excellent health, cushy job, hunky husband, lovely daughters and granddaughter, good house and car, no debts, free luxury holiday in the tropics every year. Tough life Shirl.” And yet, Winsome betrayed Shirley in a most profound way. What did you think of that betrayal and the relationship between Shirley and Winsome?
Carole’s rape as a teenager has such a profound effect on the rest of her life. At an outward glance, her acceptance of Shirley’s help and her steely focus helped her to become a very successful businesswoman. But she remains angry, and has left her Nigerian culture behind. What did you think of her journey?
“Nzinga was a teetotal, vegan, non-smoking, radical feminist separatist lesbian housebuilder, living and working on wimmin’s land all over America before moving in, a gypsy housebuilder.” but Dominique was a “drinking, drug-dabbling, chain-smoking lesbian feminist carnivorous clubbed who produced theatre by women and lived in a London flat.” How on earth did they even get together? What did you think of their relationship and Nzinga’s abuse?
“Very small children don’t care about skin colour, Rachel, until they’re brainwashed by their parents”. Think about your own childhood. In what ways were you brainwashed by your parents?
“We should celebrate that many more women are reconfiguring feminism and that grassroots activism is spreading like wildfire and millions of women are waking up to the possibility of taking ownership of our world as fully-entitled human beings…” Are you a feminist? How do you define it and what does it mean to you?

Selected Girl, Woman, Other Book Reviews

This panoramic, polyphonic novel reflects the lives of (mostly black) women in Britain, and its narrative approach could be described as literary docu-fiction”

“Twelve individual and distinctive voices all vibrating the same responsive web. Initially, I was a little dubious about the absence of punctuation as if it was nothing more than a gimmick but soon the expanses of white space on every page began to seem like open windows allowing in fresh air.”

“Besides racism, the crushing aspirations and dreams of family resting on many of the narrators, is a common theme. The contrast between metropolitan London life and country life…is an other. Unwanted sexual attention and pregnancies, and the impact this always has on women, and almost never men, also comes back a lot. These themes could make this book heavy or tedious even, but Evaristo makes it a joyous, fun, sexual and racially diverse amalgamation of women’s lives.”

“I seriously struggled with the execution of this. First, any individual story reads like a long read article from “The Guardian”. It is sketchy, aspirational, it might be a good journalism. But I am not sure it is a good literature…At minimum I want a complex, human characters. I want depth. Here, the diversity prevail over complexity. The breadth prevails over the depth.”

“I’m sorry, but life is simply too short for this sort of thing. No story, no structure, not even any punctuation, except for commas, and certainly, god forbid for being so straight-laced, no capital letters to mark the beginning of a sentence! No characters that one wants to get to know, no note-worthy prose, no clear conflict that might be resolved. Not a novel.”

NEED BOOK CLUB IDEAS?

Use our guide to find dozens of book ideas for your group.

3 Books Like Girl, Woman, Other

The Booker Prize that Evaristo got for this book was controversial because in an unprecedented move, the Booker also co-awarded to Margaret Atwood for The Testaments . You could also read that it next and then have a discussion about which book you preferred and whether the Booker was right to split the prize. Here’s our book club guide for The Testaments .

Or you can also look into other Booker nominees like, Klara and the Sun (Kazuo Ishiguru) or Small Things Like These (Claire Keegan).

If you are keen to read more books where the primary character is a woman of color, then check out our reading guide for Such a Fun Age or our Maame discussion guide . If you are interested in how race and class play out in the US, check out Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste . We also have a guide for the multi-gen story presented in The Revisioners .

Here are some additional reads for you:

We Should All Be Feminists

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In this short 64 page read, Adichie offers a new definition of feminism for the 21st century. She’s trying to update the conversation, get away from the tired old bra-burning trope and bring more reluctant folks into the fold.

This is a good read if your book club needs a break from long books. It would also be a good shared read for friends and family members who need to stop dissing feminism and start embracing it.

It's Not About the Burqa book cover Mariam Khan

It’s not About the Burqa: Muslim Women on Faith, Feminism, Sexuality and Race

by Mariam Khan

In Anglo western culture, the Burqa is one seriously misunderstood piece of cloth. The assumed submissiveness that western culture applies to the women who choose to wear a Burqa, severely diminishes Muslim women’s voices.

This essay collection aims to change that. 17 Muslim women speaking frankly about the hijab and wavering faith, about love and divorce, about feminism, queer identity, sex, and the twin threats of a disapproving community and a racist country.

The book will completely crack open any stereotypes you may have about Muslim women.

by Yaa Gyasi

If you want more stories from women of color and/or you liked the polyphonic device of multiple storylines, then you should definitely read Homegoing .

It’s an Oprah book pick and a Pen/Faulkner award winner. The book covers the 250 year history of two half-sisters who were born on Ghana’s Gold Coast, which was a major export center for slaves to the United States. The book’s format is like a family tree of subsequent generations, and the book illustrates how the legacy of slavery plays out across history, both for the enslaved and for those complicit in the slave trade.

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An Adoptee’s Search for Her Birth Mother, Pandemic Be Damned

Tracy O’Neill’s memoir, “Woman of Interest,” recounts her yearlong quest, which culminates in a trip to Korea.

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By Sloane Crosley

Sloane Crosley is the author of seven books, most recently the memoir “Grief Is for People.”

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WOMAN OF INTEREST: A Memoir , by Tracy O’Neill

Four years ago, the novelist Tracy O’Neill was languishing in her Brooklyn apartment, fresh out of a long-term relationship, when she got to thinking about her birth mother in South Korea, whom she’d never known. City life was a morass of P.C.R. tests and Zoom classes — O’Neill is an assistant professor at Vassar College — and she became fixated on the idea of a mother “who, if not dead, could be dying alone.”

Raised in New England, O’Neill had never given much thought to the circumstances behind her adoption and knew little beyond a cache of documents from when she was an infant at a Korean orphanage. Seon Ah, one filing read, using the author’s given name, “tries to hold up her head but feels uneasy.”

Autobiography without an inciting incident or outlandish background can be a tricky sell. Yet even as O’Neill struggles to justify her sudden obsession, she writes with convincing and passionate introspection. Her microscope is turned to the highest magnification, especially when it’s herself on the slide.

Initially, O’Neill does not inform her adoptive family of this hunt for a septuagenarian woman named Cho Kee Yeon. Instead, she solicits the services of a private investigator, a font of both paranoia and truth who furnishes helpful pointers like “If you were rich, you’d have figured this out already.” He tells her, essentially, to trust no one as she follows a bureaucratic trail hunting for Cho’s resident ID number, the Korean equivalent to a Social Security number, with the potential to yield an address.

During her yearlong search, O’Neill takes up with a terse Serbian boyfriend (“There are only so many words I can give and receive in a day”) and has extended interactions with lovingly painted friends. Eventually, O’Neill’s “third cousin’s father” manifests with enough information to warrant her maiden voyage to Korea, where she does not speak the language and will have to spend 10 days in quarantine meeting a family of strangers. “Even though your mom is going to welcome you,” she is warned, “your mom’s personality is not that great.”

“Woman of Interest” is written in a sporadically noir style, with sentences dressed up in trench coats: “I still didn’t have a location on her, should something go sideways.” O’Neill name-checks Raymond Chandler, though the hard-boiled moments lean more “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” (“Tell them Kiara sent you ,” a ride-share driver says to her) than “Killer in the Rain.”

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2 books offer just the right summer mix of humor and nostalgia

Maureen Corrigan

Sandwich Harper Collins hide caption

Summer reading. For me, those words suggest an unhurried expanse of time to lose myself in a good story — fiction or nonfiction. Save the dystopian novels till the fall, please; right now, I want books that glimmer like fireflies with dashes of humor and nostalgia. I’ve just read two that fit those summery specifications.

Catherine Newman’s new novel is called Sandwich , after the town on Cape Cod where her characters have rented a cottage for one precious week every summer for the past 20 years. The title also winks at the situation of our main character, Rachel, nicknamed “Rocky” who’s “halfway in age between her young adult children and her elderly parents” — all of whom crowd into that ramshackle cottage.

In the opening scene of Sandwich Rocky’s husband, Nicky, stands paralyzed, plunger in hand, before the cottage’s single, overflowing old toilet. As Rocky’s vacation week progresses, other things also slosh and overflow: secrets; messy emotions, like anger and shame; and, as Rocky tells us, her own aging body:

An illustration of a person reading a book in the grass.

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20 new books hitting shelves this summer that our critics can't wait to read.

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NPR staffers pick their favorite fiction reads of 2024

Menopause feels like a slow leak: thoughts leaking out of your head; flesh leaking out of your skin; fluid leaking out of your joints. You need a lube job, is how you feel. Bodywork.

Newman elegantly segues from Nora Ephron -like comic passages like that one to elegy. To return to the same place every summer, after all, is to be periodically brought up short by the passage of time. In the middle of the novel, for instance, Rocky uses another metaphor to describe her position in her family and this time her tone is infused with anticipatory grief:

Life is a seesaw, and I am standing dead center, still and balanced: living kids on one side, living parents on the other. Nicky here with me at the fulcrum. Don’t move a muscle, I think. But I will, of course. You have to.

Sandwich is my idea of the perfect summer novel: shimmering and substantive. One more aspect of Newman’s book deserves highlighting: like many other recent novels by best-selling female authors — I’m thinking of Jennifer Weiner , Ann Patchett and Megan Abbott — Newman introduces a storyline here about abortion. She writes about that contested subject — and the emotions it engenders — in a way that I’ve never encountered in fiction before.

When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion, by Julie Satow

When Women Ran Fifth Avenue Doubleday hide caption

As a city kid who grew up in an apartment without air-conditioning, I have happy memories of seeking relief from the heat by wandering around grand New York department stores like Bloomingdale's, Macy’s and B. Altman. Julie Satow’s new narrative history, called When Women Ran Fifth Avenue , is a treat for anyone like me who yearns to time travel back to some of those palaces of consumption at the height of their grandeur. But even more revelatory are the stories Satow excavates of the women who presided over three of the greatest and now-vanished New York department stores: Bonwit Teller, Lord & Taylor and Henri Bendel.

Geraldine Stutz rescued Bendel’s in the 1960s — as shopping moved to the suburbs -- by turning its small size into an advantage: creating exclusive boutiques within the store that attracted customers like Gloria Vanderbilt , Cher and Barbra Streisand . Some 30 years earlier, Dorothy Shaver of Lord & Taylor, who Life Magazine dubbed America’s "No. 1 Career Woman” revolutionized fashion by championing the sporty “American Look” at a time when French designers held sway.

'The Plaza' Is A Nostalgic Look At The History Of New York's Most Famous Hotel

But the stand-out figure of the trio is Hortense Odlum, a self-described “housewife” whose husband bought a near-bankrupt and “sagging” Bonwit Teller during the Great Depression and asked her to visit the store to judge it with a woman’s eye. One of her first smash successes was the introduction of a “hat department” on the main floor. In 1934, Hortense became the first woman president of an American department store.

Two summer suspense novels delight in overturning the 'woman-in-trouble' plot

Satow specializes in entertaining cultural histories — her previous book was a history of New York’s Plaza Hotel. Here, she intersperses descriptions of such wonders as Salvador Dali-designed window displays at Bonwit’s with accounts of the racism pervasive in these department stores.

For those readers immune to the allure of shopping or the shore, be assured that more of summer reading recommendations — especially mysteries and crime novels — are coming your way. You can also see what NPR staff and critics are recommending here.

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‘Girl, Woman, Other,’ a Big, Busy Novel About New Ways of Living
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'Girl, Woman, Other,' a Big, Busy Novel About New Ways of Living
"Girl, Woman, Other" is a big, busy novel with a large root system. The characters start to arrive (Amma, Yazz, Dominique, Carole, Bummi and LaTisha) and they keep arriving (Shirley, Winsome ...
Booker Prize Winner 'Girl, Woman, Other' Is Coming to America
Tom Jamieson for The New York Times. By Concepción de León. Nov. 1, 2019. The morning after Bernardine Evaristo won the Booker Prize, for her novel "Girl, Woman, Other," her American ...
'Girl, Woman, Other' Review : NPR
As a reader, I shared his relief. Let me explain. "Girl, Woman, Other" is described as a polyphonic novel about the intersections of identity. It's told from the point of view of 12 British women ...
GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER
As she creates a space for immigrants and the children of immigrants to tell their stories, Evaristo explores a range of topics both contemporary and timeless. There is room for everyone to find a home in this extraordinary novel. Beautiful and necessary. 14. Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019. ISBN: 978--8021-5698-3. Page Count: 464.
Girl, Woman, Other: A Novel
By Bernardine Evaristo. Black Cat. 464 pp. Reviewed by Robert Allen Papinchak. November 5, 2019. This Man Booker winner boasts an astonishingly vibrant, layered narrative. Look no further than Bernadine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other for the most distinctive novel of the year. Co-winner (along with Margaret Atwood's The Testaments) of the ...
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
61 books4,793 followers. Bernardine Evaristo is the Anglo-Nigerian award-winning author of several books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora: past, present, real, imagined. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker Prize in 2019. Her writing also spans short fiction, reviews, essays, drama and writing for ...
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (book review)
Girl, Woman, Other in a nutshell "Girl, Woman, Other" tells the stories of 12 Black British women, aged 19 to 90+. It is an interesting blend of diverse experiences with focus on the leitmotif of identity - personal, cultural, and artistic. The book also covers themes such as feminism, politics, racism, relationships and sexuality.
Girl, Woman, Other review: Bernardine Evaristo's Booker Prize winner is
Girl, Woman, Other. is an essential novel of race and gender: Review. A surprise co-winner of this year's Booker Prize (she shares it with Margaret Atwood, only the third time that's happened ...
Reviews of Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize, Girl, Woman, Other paints a vivid portrait of the state of post-Brexit Britain, as well as looking back to the legacy of Britain's colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean. The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly ...
Girl, Woman, Other
Girl, Woman, Other. by Bernardine Evaristo. Publication Date: November 5, 2019. Genres: Fiction, Women's Fiction. Paperback: 464 pages. Publisher: Black Cat. ISBN-10: 0802156983. ISBN-13: 9780802156983. Bernardine Evaristo is the winner of the 2019 Booker Prize and the first black woman to receive this highest literary honor in the English ...
Girl, Woman, Other
Girl, Woman, Other is the eighth novel by Bernardine Evaristo.Published in 2019 by Hamish Hamilton, it follows the lives of 12 characters in the United Kingdom over the course of several decades. The book was the co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments.. Girl, Woman, Other has received more than 30 Book of the Year and Decade honours, alongside ...
Review of Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
A sprawling patchwork of stories from a varied ensemble of characters, Girl, Woman, Other explores marginalized identities and the intricate and often uncomfortable ways people navigate them. As we meet Amma, a 50-something playwright finally experiencing mainstream success in Bernardine Evaristo's Booker Prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other, her thoughts flow over the page in a poetic form ...
'Girl, Woman, Other' Review: Navigating Identity, Difference
W omxn of unheard voices and unsung praises are at the heart of Bernardine Evaristo's 2019 Booker Prize-winning novel 'Girl, Woman, Other'. It is a book that puts presence back into absence.
Review: Girl, Woman, Other
Girl, Woman, Other is a tale of 12 Black, British women of different ages, cultural backgrounds, social statuses, gender identities, etc. - "from a lesbian playwright to a jaded schoolteacher to a non-binary social media influencer." Each chapter contains three sub-chapters, each of which tells the story of one of these women. For example, chapter one includes the stories of Amma, her daughter ...
Review: Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo
Cover Description. From one of Britain's most celebrated writers of color, Girl, Woman, Other is a magnificent portrayal of the intersections of identity and a moving and hopeful story of an interconnected group of Black British women.Shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize, Girl, Woman, Other paints a vivid portrait of the state of post-Brexit Britain, as well as ...
Girl, Woman, Other: Must-Read Books of 2019
In Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo traces the histories of 12 different characters in the U.K. over more than 100 years. With each new woman…
January: "Girl, Woman, Other" by Bernardine Evaristo
Our January 2020 Book of the Month. Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, the British-Nigerian winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, compels me to use the often cliché term tour de force. This brilliant eighth novel outshines the lifetime achievement nod to Margaret Atwood that had it share the spotlight with an inferior work.
'Girl, Woman, Other,' by Bernardine Evaristo book review
Bernardine Evaristo's 'Girl, Woman, Other' received half a Booker Prize, but it deserves all the glory. Review by Ron Charles. October 28, 2019 at 11:37 a.m. EDT. Margaret Atwood and ...
Girl Woman Other Book Review
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo had been on my reading pile for months by the time I finally got around to reading it. Like many people, I had watched in bafflement when the Booker judges made the notorious decision to award the 2019 prize to both Evaristo and Atwood - a choice that broke the rules implemented in 2019 which stated that only one author could be crowned winner.
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Review: Evaristo's "Girl, Woman, Other" is a Love Song to Black
Girl, Woman, Other claimed a space among my all-time favourite books. I went in with high expectations, and they were all exceeded. This book will be marked as a classic in the years to come. The book you never knew you needed, but here it is. I highly recommend that you grab your copy ASAP. Girl, Woman, Other BY Bernardine Evaristo. 2019.
Girl, Woman, Other
*Blonde Roots (3.5/5 Goodreads review) *Hello Mum (3.5/5 Goodreads review) "Bernardine Evaristo is the Anglo-Nigerian award-winning author of several books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora: past, present, real, imagined. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker Prize in 2019.
Girl, Woman, Other Book Club Questions & Discussion Guide
Girl, Woman, Other Book Club Questions & Discussion Guide. September 7, 2021 by Carol Guttery. Bernardine Evaristo won the 2019 Booker for Girl, Woman, Other, the first Black woman to do so. And if it annoys you that, in the last 20 years, women have only won the Booker 7 times, then I'm sure you were able to appreciate the feminist thread in ...
Book Review: 'Woman of Interest,' by Tracy O'Neill
Tracy O'Neill's memoir, "Woman of Interest," recounts her yearlong quest, which culminates in a trip to Korea. By Sloane Crosley Sloane Crosley is the author of seven books, most recently ...
'Sandwich' and 'When Women Ran Fifth Avenue' review: Perfect ...
As a city kid who grew up in an apartment without air-conditioning, I have happy memories of seeking relief from the heat by wandering around grand New York department stores like Bloomingdale's ...

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