Magnificent novel of such grand scope and ambition. This is a novel about 12 women but it is also a sweeping history of the black British experience. The attention to detail, the structure, the syntax, it’s all brilliant and moving and truly represents what fiction at its finest.

After hearing so much about this novel, a joint winner of the Booker prize, I was incredibly keen to read this. Bernardine Evaristo writes vibrantly of a contemporary Britain that is rarely seen, challenging, giving us a glimpse of its past, present and future, with a seamless feminist narrative that goes back and forth in time, an unconventional structure, poetic prose, and a disregard of the normal conventions of punctuation. She presents us with a broad and diverse spectrum of black women's v...

Excellent novel, totally deserving the Booker Prize 2019. It was also surprisingly accessible comparing it to other winners that I've read. The author put me in the shoes and mind of an amazing and varied selection of black women. While I did not like all of them, Alma the binding character being an example, I got to understand more about what it is/was to be a person of colour in this world and especially in the UK. The interesting structure of the novel makes the writing poetic, it made me fly...

“... we don’t exist in a vacuum… we are all part of a continuum, repeat after me, the future is in the past and the past is in the present”One of the things I missed most these last couple of years is listening to and watching my almost adult children perform with their respective music groups. Concert band, jazz band, choir. How I delighted in hearing all those wonderful, fresh voices and varied instruments come together to offer their audience a tuneful and often moving experience. Concert ban...

The winner of the 2019 Man Booker Prize, Girl, Woman, Other takes an energetic look at British Black womanhood. The linked short story collection consists of four triptychs, each focusing on the hopes and frustrations of Black women as they navigate Britain’s social hierarchy. Evaristo’s fragmented prose is compelling and propels the cinematic collection forward; again and again at a breakneck pace the highlights of a life are surveyed, from school troubles to late-in-life despair. A lesbian pla...

be a person with knowledge not just opinions A few weeks ago, I tried my hand at answering one of The Guardian's Book Q&A questions and one of the more memorable Qs was which book have you read do you wish you'd written? At the time, I answered predictably and generically but now I would like to emphatically change my answer because, THIS, this is the book I wish I'd written.It is also the book I wish I'd read when it came out. A book I wish would never end. And literally the best

2.5, rounded down.This pushed a lot of negative buttons for me, so I am the first to admit my rating MIGHT be a case of 'It's probably NOT you, it's me'.' First of all, this is really a series of interconnected short stories, rather than a true 'novel', and I always have trouble digesting such. Secondly - the majority of the 12 chapters prior to the final two of summation and 'connect-the-dot-ness' are not even stories... they are character profiles, a compilation of specific 'factoids' that acc...

Well deserved Booker prize 2019 winner!Filled with humor while narrating the racially and sexual diverse female experience in Great BrittainI am a major sucker for interconnected, contemporary stories (Cloud Atlas is my favourite book and David Mitchell my favourite writer) so Girl, Woman, Other is right up my alley from that perspective.Bernardine Evaristo captures lives in a convincing, seemingly effortless manner, while following the twelve narrators who are loosely bound by a theater perform...

Now shortlisted for the prestigious international 2021 Dublin Literary AwardWinner (jointly) of the 2019 Booker Prize - perhaps appropriately given its closing words this is about beingtogether A book I have read and loved three times so I was delighted to be present for its win and to get these photosWhen hearing the winner announcement I immediately thought of a passage very early in the book when it says Amma then spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbing hand grenades at the estab...

Polyphonic choir of women, singing a song of life in dissonances and harmonies! This may well be my favourite book of 2019, curing a stress-related Reader's Block with instant effect. Sharing is caring, and Bernardine Evaristo shares life experiences that stretch a century back in time and move towards our immediate, contemporary world. She cares for her characters, and that results in the reader caring too. I found myself identifying with a bitter school teacher, with a strong creative woman s...

Girl, Woman, Other started off so well for me. I absolutely adored the first triptych of stories, about two queer, creative women of color and the college-age daughter of one of them. I loved the characters and I loved the writing style, and I was excited to keep going. Eventually, though, the sameness of the tone and style began to frustrate me, and the stories began to feel a bit like checking off boxes: Here is the immigrant experience, here is the experience of a devotee of white feminism, h...

Girl, Woman, Other is quite the achievement. To have so much going on, so many different characters and stories, all in the space of a less than 500-page novel, AND somehow manage to make it emotionally-engaging and not confusing... well, few authors could do it. If you enjoyed the style of books like Homegoing, there's a good chance you will like this one also.Evaristo has taken on the challenge of portraying a vast array of experiences had by predominantly black women in Britain. Like Homegoin...

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. What is it? One critic here said it was more like a collection of personal essays or feminist manifestos that might have been publishe...

✩✩✩ Joint Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2019 ✩✩✩ ”On Our Own Terms or Not At All.”Twelve stories from twelve women.When I started reading this, the stories seemed straightforward. Deceptively simple & relatively harmless. At face value they seemed to be about “women’s stuff”.Was I wrong! Upfront, this review will be all over the shop. Bear with. There is just so much going on in this book, it’s a challenge for me to reflect this properly in this review.We meet women of different ages, socio-ec

Update: This predictably has won the Booker 2019 (jointly). And if it is the best book of the shortlist, I am very happy about my decision not to spend time reading any others shortlisted this year. Original review:Unfortunately I ended up disappointed by this book, though I really wanted to like it. In fact, it is the only book from this year Booker I’ve decided to read. (I’ve read two others before they were long listed. ) It seems this book is widely admired by others. But it has fallen quite...

Okay, folks, I had some time to think about it ... so here goes nothing. The more I reminisce about this particular book the more I cannot shake the feeling that this ... simply ain't it. I'm sorry. If this is the best what Britain has to offer at the moment, the situation is more grave than I initially thought. Uff. Where do we even start here? The book has no overarching story. Instead, each chapter of the book follows the life of one of the 12 characters (mostly Black women) as they negotiate...

it’s easy to forget that England is made up of many Englandsa cosy scratchy patchwork of connected storiesa polyphonic harmony of dissonant voicesa hymn, ancient and modern, to women of coloura beautifully disorienting kaleidoscopic lensprivilegewe’re often told to check your privilege I have a privileged lifeit doesn’t always feel that way: I’ve known heartbreak, loss, and worries about work, money, and healthand I’m a woman in what is still rather more of a man’s worldbut I have/had two parent...

Winner of the Booker Prize 2019 (together with The Testaments)This panoramic, polyphonic novel reflects the lives of (mostly black) women in Britain, and its narrative approach could be described as literary docu-fiction: The 12 protagonists are all fictional, of different ages, with different cultural and social backgrounds and with different personalities, and the book provides its readers with the women's condensed life stories, packed with information, always keeping a certain observational

Be it gay, straight, single, married, transgender, vegan, feminist, young, old, eating, smoking, sleeping, sexing, drug using, radically living, liberal or conservative thinking, housecleaning, chef, voodoo queen, minorities, divine beings, social issues, gender and race issues, mother, daughter, goddess, dirt poor or not, friendships, lovers, thespian, educated or not, etc. etc...these Black British women from different backgrounds had stories to tell. A stream of consciousness feeling....These...

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. I loved Evaristo's characters and the vitality and breezy skill with which she developed them. It seemed to me she was introducing brand new people into the archives of literature. It's a novel that celebra...