Winner of the 2019 Booker Prize.
Winner of the 2020 IBW Indie Book Award for Fiction.
What We're Reading:
Natalia, ABC Amsterdam staff, June 2020.
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 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 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.
Staff Choice: Sophie
This was a beautiful group of stories showing the length and breadth and – above all – depth of the lives of Black women in the UK today and in the past century or so (but mostly today).
I don’t think I could have read about and learned from a more diverse group of girls/women/others: feminists, traditionalists, young, old, struggling, successful, recent immigrant, xth generation… And every single one of them contained such a wealth of details and back stories; I couldn’t believe Evaristo managed that level of depth in 30 pages per person. I loved how they were all connected, too, and how everything combined into one loose but coherent story.