Girl, Woman, Other is an ode to identity, strength and perseverance. It follows twelve women of different ages and socioeconomic backgrounds with different pasts and goals whose paths cross at some point in their lives. It narrates the struggles these women have faced, from abuse to social exclusion, and praises the successes of each one however small or big they may be. It explores complex topics like race, sexuality and spirituality through its twelve diverse characters. And most of all, it celebrates these women as the beautifully flawed people they are and gives room for reflection without any bias.

When it comes to character and setting, Evaristo proudly and rightfully shows off her incredible storytelling skills as she builds up to the final chapters where the twelve characters' journeys collide. Each character is unique in her identity and I adored getting to know them all. Although there were twelve different stories, there was never a moment where I felt that the narrative was too repetitive or the stories too similar. By the end the characters came to life and their adventures felt so vivid that they could easily have been real.

Unfortunately I struggled a lot with the writing style and pace. The book is written in prose with no full stops and, although I admire this unconventional style which fits with the tone of the book, I could not get used to this structure and found my thoughts drifting with the lack of punctuation. As a result it took me a very long time to finish the book as I was forced to keep reading back to understand what had happened. For me this was the biggest drawback and had it not been for this style I would have easily considered this to be the book of the year.

Despite not taking a liking to the writing style, I still found a lot to love in Girl, Woman, Other. It felt revolutionary to me, partly because I am ashamed to say that I did not previously consider the struggles that black women face in society. This book truly opened my eyes to some of these hardships and encouraged me to reflect on this more, which I am very grateful for. After finishing Girl, Woman, Other I can completely understand why it won the 2019 Booker Prize and will continue to encourage others to read this book so they can understand it for themselves.

I admittedly hadn’t taken much notice of this novel until Evaristo (jointly) won the Booker but I’m so glad that I got there eventually. The interweaving stories that make up this tale of black womanhood are heartbreaking, funny, realistic, and relatable and manage to show both the commonalities and the differences between generations of women and non binary people. Plus, as everyone else has said, the language is beautifully poetic. I really really loved it.

Great characters with a variety of backgrounds and the author did a wonderful job tying all of their stories together. The only thing that frustrated me was the lack of punctuation. It may be easier to read in a physical format, but I found myself getting frustrated reading it from my Kindle.

Given that I find novels without punctuation usually difficult to read, I am surprised at how much I like this one. Each chapter is a little biography of a different woman but their relationships to each other are touched upon during the novel and the ending brings closure to their stories. The book really explores many themes, gender and race being the major two. I loved every character and the funny, loving way the life of each progressed.

Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for the ARC to read and review.

This set of connected stories made my head swim delightfully with so many women’s lives flowing out in parallel and back in time over the generations. Though mostly set in London, I felt that the interweaving of the tales and voices was less a communal biography of place or a community, as in Maupin’s “Tales from the City” or Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio”, than a multifaceted portrait of modern society and its persisting assaults on the “better angels of our nature”. Because the characters are almost all black women with recent African roots, there is an extra heroism to their forging of sustainable identities in the face of racism, sexism, and alienation of the immigrant experience. The latter is shown indirectly in the lives of several women whose mothers migrated from Africa or the Caribbean and, in some cases, directly as we step back into a narration of the lives of their mothers and grandmothers. The flow down life’s rivers along many tributaries was a wonderful experience, embracing gay, straight, and transsexual lifestyles, conservative and leftist outlooks, lower and upper class lives, all pointing to optimism about people finding a meaningful trajectory through life despite living in an age of nationalism and Brexit.

Among the eleven characters given chapters in first person, the two whose voices entertained me the most for their verve and bold arc of development were Amma and her daughter Yazz. Amma is a middle-aged theater director about to put on an avant garde play on Amazon warriors, an event that becomes a focal point for intersection among many of characters in the book. We experience through her memories the highlights of her rebellion against her father’s expectations of her to follow his cultural values he formed in Ghana, which he was forced to flee because of his socialist politics. Her feminist attacks on misogyny among many of his heroes, coming out as lesbian in high school, and pursuit of many lovers throughout her life, contributed a lot to their long breach. In compensation she allows her own daughter Yazz a lot of freedom during her passage through adolescence. What she ends up reaping in complaints from her about being a “feminazi”. Part in jest, Yazz at age 15 lays this attack on her outlook:

<i> I reckon we’re all going to be non-binary in the future, neither male nor female, which are rendered performances anyway, which mean’s your <u>women’s</u> politics, Mumsy, will become redundant, and by the way, I’m humanitarian, which is on a much higher plane than feminism.</i>

In the Yazz chapter, we experience how her openness at college leads to forging deep friendships with women with a broad diversity of backgrounds, including a Muslim from an oppressed Somali family, an ambitious girl from a conservative rich Egyptian family, and a poor white girl raised on a Surrey farm. It was fun to tour their shenanigans of this group (they call themselves the ‘Unfuckwithables’) and to learn how they came to understand that privilege and its opposite are relative and contextual.

In another story, we tap into the experience of the opposite of freedom, that of getting trapped in a relationship marked by a personal fascism. The character Dominique, Anna’s theater company friend who has Afro-Caribbean roots, falls in love with a charismatic older black woman, Nzinga, who works in America with a group of women who build houses for the underprivileged. Nzinga persuades her to join her all-female community in rural Oregon, which feels at first like a utopia. But fighting the power of the patriarchy in society is a bit different from a total ban of men on the premises. Nzinga’s constraints on Dominique even talking to men in the town or being friends with straight women becomes a nightmare comparable to women who suffer in domestic abuse situations with men. How Amma comes to save her makes for fun reading.

The one transsexual character, Megan now Morgan, is not a simple case of a woman taking on the role and form of a man, but an example of someone who feels non-binary with respect to gender. This will be enlightening to many readers like me who need more help imagining such a state as a viable and stable choice. In contrast to the main character of Winterson’s “Frankinssstein: A Love Story”, who thrives on a sense of gender duality, Morgan’s sense is of non-gendered. They are similar in wanting to lose their breasts (not yet completed by Morgan) while avoiding genital sex-change surgery, but Morgan is oriented toward women for partners and Winterson’s character goes for men.

On top of the great collage in storytelling, Evaristo has an innovative style in her prose. The author dispenses with periods in favor of line breaks. Once I got used to that, I found it contributes to the sense of narrative flow. I balked a bit on the lack of capitalization as definitive beginnings of sentences, but I came to feel it added to the continuity with prior sentences. At times the narrative leans toward prose poetry. For example, she sometimes emulates stumbling thoughts or step-like transitions in perception or action by means of line breaks that slice her sentences. For example, here Carole, a young financial manager with Nigerian family roots and hobbies of skeet shooting and horse riding, reflects on how she:

<i> loves dancing like a warrior queen to frenzied beats of the war-painted shamanistic godfather, Fela Kuti … she loves to watch on YouTube
while dancing
for herself
out of it
out of her head
out of her body
feeling it
freeing it
nobody watching
nobody judging</i>

Humor leavens our perception of her privileged status, as when she completes her morning mantra in the bathroom mirror:
<i>I am highly presentable, likeable, clubbable, relatable, promotable and successful …</i> [repeated four times]

Her mother, Bummi, is an immigrant from Nigeria who has worked her way up from housecleaning to running a housecleaning company. Her daughter ignores her lineup of nice Nigerian boys as marriage prospects and marries an older white man, leaving Bummi to bemoan:
<i>… it was the beginning of the end of the pure Nigerian family line
their children will be mixed, and their children will look white
to be wiped out in two generations
is this why we came to England?</i>

Nice use of line breaks there. As a sample of special prose, we here catch Bummi’s sly irony in her parting comment after submitting to a wealthy lecherous bishop in order to get a business loan:
<i>thank you, sah, she said, curtsying, humble
God don butta my bread</i>

As another example of irony, the cases of black characters concerned about their children losing their racial identity through intermarriage is matched by the one main white character learning from an Ancestry DNA that not only is she more Irish than English and has significant Jewish heritage, she has a16% black African heritage. While she took it hard as a teenager learning that she was adopted, she has a more positive reaction in forging an altered sense of self, leading her to track down her biological mother and learn some of the secrets of her ancestry.

Overall, I found this book quite an engaging and uplifting tapestry of family and culture over the generations and worthy of the Booker Prize.

This book was provided by the publisher for review through the Netgalley program.

Great read. The author wrote a story that was interesting and moved at a pace that kept me engaged. The characters were easy to invest in.

Although this is a book of short stories, they are so well connected one to another that the book reads like a novel. There are twelve chapters, each featuring a different character. They are all black British women. But other than that they don't have a lot in common. They are of many ages and have a wide variety of jobs. They come from different classes and cultures. Some of them are gay. Some are married. And one has come out as transgender (nonbinary) and no longer identifies as female.
Although this is a book of short stories, they are so well connected one to another that the book reads like a novel. There are twelve chapters, each featuring a different character. They are all black British women. But other than that they don't have a lot in common. They are of many ages and have a wide variety of jobs. They come from different classes and cultures. Some of them are gay. Some are married. And one has come out as transgender (nonbinary) and no longer identifies as female.

It is a book about diversity and culture, but it never feels like the author is trying to force her political opinions upon the reader. In fact it didn't feel like a book exploring differences, but more one of similarities. How am I and this black, British nonbinary person the same? The story is enjoyable and thought-provoking.

I listened to the book on audio, so I cannot speak to the form of the words on the page. I have read that the form and structure are unique, with sections of the book appearing more like poetry than prose. On the audiobook this doesn't really come through.

A book with 12 black protagonists? Yes, and all of them women? Yes!

This is a smart, smart book. But it reads easily, and quickly. It is warm, funny, compassionate, empathetic. The characters are sometimes confronting, but generally likable. I am very close to 5 stars on this one.

I am profoundly ignorant when it comes to English culture, and in particular, for the sake of this review, Black English culture, so this was a bit of an introduction. It also left me with a number of questions, which is precisely what introductions should do. I live in the United States and, even though I'm white and an immigrant I can say with a certain degree of assurance that there is such a thing as African American culture. Of course there are more Black people than African Americans, or maybe some people who don't quite identify as African Americans while being Black; and of course when we say that "there is such a thing as African American culture" we do not mean that all African Americans think/feel/behave the same.

Having said all this, I have a feeling from this novel that there isn't an analogous culture in the UK. The Black people in this book don't feel themselves part of a community that is grounded, identifiably, on skin color or biological heritage. They or their ancestors come from the Caribbean and from Africa, and many of them are first-or second generation British. They have white friends and go to mixed schools and live in mixed neighborhoods. Some of them are poor and some of them are extravagantly rich. Even those who start off poor seem to end up comfortable as they grow old and for somebody who has spent half of her life in the United States, a country whose limitations to social mobility massively belie its own understanding of itself (the much vaunted American Dream), this is such a breath of fresh air.

In fact, much as there is heartbreak in this book, there is above all an exuberant sense of the myriad ways you can be a Black woman in the UK, and you can thrive. It is, in other words, a joyous and celebratory book and I for one am grateful to see so many queer women represented as satisfied, integrated and fulfilled.

Writers from underrepresented communities are particularly fun to read because they tend to invent their own forms. This novel defies many of the rules of what makes something a novel. The most striking and new, in my opinion, is its resistance to giving us emotionally engaging slices of life in favor of long-span chronicles of women's life that feel more journalistic than narrative. And this is brave because the western novel reader is used to compelling stories, not one-chapter accounts of people's lives, one after the other. So, western reader, if you feel some dissatisfaction, just realize that Evaristo is doing something different here: a folder of women, a chronicle, a beautiful presentation.

Note: This review ran in Mountain Times (Boone, N.C.) on Nov. 14, full review at link provided

“Girl, Woman, Other: A Novel” by Bernardine Evaristo (Grove Press, Black Cat)

Bernadine Evaristo’s “Girl, Woman, Other” is a sweeping, experimental novel styled in a free-verse structure that earned the author half a Booker Prize (she shared the recent award with Margaret Atwood, the first time the prize committee, against its own rules, named co-winners). But for its artistry and a plot that delves deep into the lives of 12 women — diverse and independent — Evaristo's work has been a critical and commercial success. To say the novel is complex is an understatement, but Evaristo masterfully layers the women’s stories, creating from her palette a cross-section of Britain that is more inclusive than any other story you’re likely to read this year.

I started Girl, Woman, Other on the morning of the day it was announced as one of two Booker prize winners this year. I was vaguely aware it had been nominated and had no idea it was going to win that day. But I’m happy to see that it won. I absolutely loved it. It will likely be my favourite novel of the year. It feels original and contemporary, while delivering great characters and good storytelling. Evaristo tells the story of 14 interconnected characters — primarily women of colour in England. Their stories span the 20th and 21st centuries. There’s some heartbreak, a bit of humour and a tad of a political undertone — but mostly lots of heart. I loved each story and I loved how they were connected, and especially how they come together beautifully at the end.

I rarely read books twice, but I could definitely see reading this one again. It would make for a great audiobook.

Thanksgiving to Netgalley and the publisher for an opportunity to read an advance copy.

Literary fiction at its best drew me took me to England the world of these spectacular women,A five star read a book I will be gifting my book loving friends .Deserves every award.#netgalley#groveatlantic

Simply the best book of the year. Brilliant, funny, heartbreaking full on characters you want in your life who stay in your head. I’m a better person for having read this. Thank you Bernadine for your powerful, utterly breathtaking writing.

This is a superb book - and definitely deserved (joint) winner of the 2019 Man Booker prize - and Bernadine Evaristo kept me enthralled the whole way through which, to me, is one of the markers of a great read.

Evaristo deals with women's lives, mainly focused on modern-day London. Each section examines a different character with there being overlap between many of them - and the key feature being that race and skin colour are key to the characters' stories. An example is Amma - a newly-successful playwright with her play opening at the National Theatre - and then another section deals with Yazz, her daughter.

The novel is current. It is modern and relevant to us all. I particularly like the way Evaristo uses the third-person but with this all-seeing, omniscient perspective; it gives a convincing voice to each section, despite the character in question not telling their story per se. The author is extremely skilled at 'painting' a picture of a character and their life, almost like they are talking to the reader - but they definitely aren't.

Parts of this are funny; many parts are sad, despite not seeming to be on the surface. Structurally, the lack of full-stops (which I thought would irritate me at first) is actually a clever device employed by Evaristo to increase the urgency of her story - and the reader's thirst to want to know how Shirley links to Penelope or what happens to Dominique when she escapes the clutches of a controlling relationship.

'Girl, Woman, Other' is superb. Having been awarded the Man Booker 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood, I do hope this doesn't overshadow the merits of Evaristo's work. I recommend this to anyone who cares about our world today, particularly as its timing (Brexit, the race row, being non-binary, to name a few issues) could not be any more relevant.

Twelve different women, twelve different fates. Bernardine Evaristo was awarded the Man Booker Prize 2019 for her novel which does not have a real plot with an all-embracing story but for each of the main characters offers a short insight in their life often at crucial turning point. Their stories overlap, are often cleverly intertwined. What they share is the fact that they address fundamental topics: first of all, I’d say “Girl, Woman, Other“ is a feminist novel since the cause of the woman in modern England, mostly the black woman, is the central topic. Apart from this, relationships, sexuality and gender identity are tackled as well as politics and what it means to be successful.

“His bredren and sistren could damned well speak up for themselves. Why should he carry the burden of representation when it will only hold him back? White people are only required to represent themselves, not an entire race.”

What does it mean to be different? To be black or brown in a predominantly white community. To be homosexual or gender fluid in a primarily heterosexual society. To be a working woman when women are supposed to stay at home to take care of the children and the household. Even when the point of disdain has been overcome, the problems and strange reactions have not necessarily and quite often, the singular example who enters a new community has to represent a whole group and loses his or her individuality.

What the characters unites is to differ from the mainstream which does not go unnoticed and uncommented. Most of them go through a tough time which leaves them stronger and makes it easy to empathise with them. The characters are complex, their lives are complicated and at the end of their chapter, they are not the same person they were at the beginning. Which also offers the reader the chance to leave their stand point and to change perspective on certain topics.

The novel is full of life and with the award, the spotlight has been turned on to black female and queer literature which have been awfully underrepresented in literary discussion. This is surely one of the strongest novels of 2019 since it contributes to the ongoing public discourse.

It just didn't work for me. I can see why this book is important, I can see why the reviews are so stunning and hence why the Booker prize. I love that all of the stories are about strong black women, about their journeys, about their history, and about finding their place in the present. But the way of writing was a bit too much for me. Sometimes I just couldn't follow the flow of their minds, the lack of structure of sentences. And around forth or fifth character I just got lost in the whole scheme of who is who and who is who to whom. Maybe it would be easier to follow if I wrote it all down while reading and made myself a diagram of characters.

Big thank you to NetGalley for giving me a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. I really appreciate it.

I always enjoy reading the prize winning books, so this was a must read. I had a very hard time getting into at first. There is obviously the cultural differences between, the author, her characters and myself but the structure lent itself to a immediate leap into the narrative which I found a bit hard to follow at first.
Once I began reading and realized that each section and each chapter is a story unto itself, I found my rhythm and took my time immersing myself into the lives of the characters.

Evaristo is a master story teller. Her excellent writing breaths life into each and everyone of these individuals. I wondered while reading whether the author had known similar people in real life because she so easily got across their complex personalities in very few words.

A well deserved win for the Booker.

I honestly wasn't sure what to expect from this book but I can't say enough good things about it now. I really really loved it! It is written differently than most books I've read and the connection between the stories was amazing, the immigrants' backgrounds, the racism they face or internalize, so much goodness in this book. I've already recommended it several times over because it is just that good!

I requested this novel when it shared the Booker Prize this year. The stories that Evaristo of black women living in the UK are varied and important. Overall, the novel has beautiful, poetic writing and she presents these stories in an unusual and effective style, the result feeliing is that all of these stories are swirling around you at once, making them impossible to ignore, which they largely are. So, overall, very affecting. It did take me a minute to get into the cadence of her writing, but once I did, the book had a lyrical quality that I loved.

Bernardine Evaristo's Booker Prize winning Girl, Woman, Other is a wonderful exploration of the many ways of being a black woman in Britain and a really engaging read. Evaristo said she wondered if she could write a book with 100 black women and Girl, Woman, Other must be nearly there with its interconnected vignettes focusing on 11 black women and one non-binary person and the many other black women in their lives.

From the radical lesbian theatre-maker based on the author's experiences in the 80s, to the council estate-raised bank vice president assimilating into the English ruling classes, to the northern farmer's wife in the 1920s, and the racist woman who doesn't realise she is black, the book spans over 100 years and women from diverse classes and experiences.

It feels less like a novel and more of a collection of life histories. The differences between even the closely connected women were so interesting, and I really liked how you would get a sense of a character, then switch to her mother or daughter's story and her a whole new understanding of her. I loved how many middle aged queer women were included, plus the non binary character and their trans girlfriend.

What worked less well for me was where the author has current political debates explicitly played out on the page through discussions between characters. This felt heavy-handed and clumsy and took me out of the story the several times it happened.

I foolishly stayed up till 2am I was so absorbed in this book, and could read another book's worth telling the stories of all the peripheral characters. So I guess that makes it a strong recommendation, especially as it's #blackhistorymonth in the UK and it challenges lots of racist ideas about black women's roles in Britain.

I am a huge fan of Bernardine and the first novel I read from her and absolutely loved was Mr. Loverman. Now Girl, Woman, Other has taken my breath away. I will read anything she puts out. I’m locked in as a forever fan. This novel is a must read. Thanks to NetGalley & Grove Atlantic for gifting me this copy in exchange for an honest review. A full goodreads/amazon review coming soon.