I'm disappointed that I could only give three stars to each of the Booker joint winners this year, which really dampens my initial excitement that strong feminist writers took the top prize. I found myself often irritated with this book, which aspires to be avant garde in a stream of consciousness spoken word style that instead feels overbearingly predictable when couched with thinkpieces disguised as natural free flowing conversation. I would have enjoyed the straddling of poetry and prose if I didn't constantly feel bogged down by characters speaking almost entirely in bullet points. Points that need to be made, certainly, but I did occasionally feel like I was enduring a game of stay woke bingo.
Instead I found pleasure in the quieter stories where I felt the power of the author shone. Dominique, the black goddess diminished by domestic abuse. Bummi as well was a standout character for me, the dignity of her chapters illustrating so much of a human life- love, loss, immigration, motherhood, bisexuality (especially as it pertains to expression in minority groups), marriage, grief and picking up the pieces then finally love again. I enjoyed Girl, Woman, Other in the more relatable moments, the spaces between the monologues and to quote the author herself, in spite of a healthy dose of "intellectual showmanship".

This is a beautiful, lyrical, accomplished and original book. Unfortunately, I found it really hard work. Part of the problem is that it doesn't lend itself to eBook format at all. For me, the lack of structure and traditional formatting made it almost impossible to get through or follow, which I am sad about because I found the stories of the woman fascinating and I wish that the book had been more accessible.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo has 12 main characters and I enjoyed some of their stories more than others.

I tend to try and actively avoiding reading ‘acclaimed’ books that have won prizes (mostly because it gives me flashbacks to doing an English degree, which was not always conducive to the joy of reading). However, after I’d got used to the prose type lay out of this book, and also got over the fact this book has no full stops in it (which took about 50 pages), I fell in love with it a little bit. A collection of short stories about girls, women (and other) in and around the UK, all from different backgrounds and often - but not always - in the minority, this book was truly fascinating. I particularly loved seeing how all the characters interlinked with each other. Beautifully written, this book is definitely worthy of its accolades.

Girl, Woman, Other is the most wonderful book I’ve read in some time. Life affirming, complex and challenging, it tells stories of twelve characters’ lives in twentieth and twenty first century Britain. Evaristo’s characters are mostly black British women of different backgrounds and ages and the book deals with gender, race, identity, sexuality, belonging and love.

The book is divided into four long chapters, each containing three characters narratives. In the first, Amma is an anti-establishment theatre director about to stage her first play at the National Theatre, Yazz, her daughter an outspoken literature student and Dominique, her best friend and one-time collaborator now living in the US.

In the second chapter, Carole grew up with her single mother Bummi on a Peckham council estate and is now a high-flying City banker. LaTisha is her former school friend. In the third, Shirley is a school teacher who helped Carole gain scholarship to Oxford, her mother Winsome, now retired in Barbados and Penelope is Shirley’s colleague. In the fourth, Megan/ Morgan struggles with her gender identity growing up to become a trans-influencer-activist, her great grandmother Hattie is 90-something Northumberland farmer and her mother Grace, now deceased. The fifth and final chapter sees some of these characters brought together at the afterparty for Amma’s play.

Apart from these obvious connections, the characters are also linked in less obvious ways, which were a joy to discover. Another obvious - and infectious thing is Evaristo’s love for these people, their flaws and all. By the end of the book I felt like I knew them all deeply and loved them too. This is due to Evaristo’s writing style. With no punctuation marks and capitals to start sentences, I was initially put off but by the end of the first page, you realise there is a rhythm to everything and it flows. It felt immediate, personal, conversational and intimate. I absolutely loved it.

So happy that Bernardine Evaristo won the Booker and I’m very grateful to Penguin Books, Hamish Hamilton and Netgalley for the opportunity to read it.

Exceptional- one of my favourite books of the year. A deserving winner of the Booker. Memorable characters and such life in the language.

My GOD, this book.

The story follows several black women whose lives intersect. Each chapter details their background, and relationship with society; there's an award winning playwright, a lesbian who gets drawn into a cult, a high achieving woman in finance. It's funny, thoughtful, enlightening - everything I'd hoped for. ⁣I laughed, I cried, I FELT SO MANY THINGS. Tens across the board. ⁣

Wow no wonder this novel won the Booker prize 2019, ‘Girl, woman, other ‘ by Bernardine Evaristo is an incredible novel. I loved the fact that all the women’s stories were different, yet in many ways so similar. The end when the link was revealed felt just right and not contrived like in so many novels. ’

Frank, multi-generational stories of changing roles and identity in modern Britain including immigration, sexual attraction, gender politics and family dynamics. The complexity of these women’s experiences are expressed with humour and candour and as the novel progresses the inter-relationships become clearer as the women try to understand their own roles with those if their parents, siblings, colleagues and children.

Thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Books. .

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 voices, all distinct, from differing backgrounds, ages, roots, class, occupations, families, from many parts of the country and sexuality in all its forms. It speaks of race, living and surviving in a white dominant culture and its implications and repercussions, the broad church of thinking when it comes to the definition of black and the questions of identity. I found it to be a profoundly moving, beautifully written and imaginative read, sensitive, compassionate, so human and ingenious in its portrayal and focus on the women, with its obvious and not so obvious connections with each other. Brilliant and so deserving of the accolades it is receiving. Many thanks to Penguin UK for a copy of the book.

This book is mainly twelve stories from twelve different women. I can see why it won the Booker as it tells a fabulous story that has many layers and depths. I think it will become a must-read for British women (and others) in the years to come.

I loved this. Very cleverly written in terms of style and structure with characters that i wanted to know more about. Each chapter left me wanting to follow that character again. Fantastic approach to different perspectives.

I was so looking forward to reading this, but found it very disappointing. For me the construct got in the way of the story, such as it was, which prevented me from being able to get into it - it was just too airy-fairy for the characters to seem real.

I really enjoyed reading this book and was pleasantly surprised at how easy a read it was. It did take me a little bit of time to adapt to the style, and lack of punctuation and capitalisation but after the first couple of chapters I stopped noticing this and was engrossed.

I especially liked hearing the individual voices and experiences depicted by the twelve women and the interweaving between otherwise separate stories and experiences.

The interconnected web of characters and events beautifully created in this novel by Bernardine Evaristo in Girl. Woman, Other is insightful and sensitive with a poetic turn of phrase which enchants. For those less familiar with the politics of gender, race and its emerging vocabulary, Evaristo offers useful explanations through conversations within families where awareness is reluctantly awakened in some, warmly embraced in others.

It is a wonderful wander through the stories of generations of people's experience, particularly black women, of race and racism, slavery, bigotry, discrimination, feminism, bi-sexuality, relationships and progress to a (somewhat) more enlightened and integrated age.

Set in various parts of the UK, USA and with hints of other countries and continents, much of the narrative takes place in London, where elements of Windrush, Brixton riots and other key events in emancipation occurred. There are fascinating insights and accounts of relationships, roles and acknowledgement of the complexity of gender. A triumph.

Written in a modern form of prose it takes a little time to get used to this. But persevere this didn’t win the Booker Prize for nothing. Very enjoyable tale of lots of different peoples stories. Couldn’t put this down.
5/5 on goodreads.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I had to give up halfway through sadly! I was so excited to read this and was so pleased when I was given it but I just couldn’t get into it. I didn’t like the characters at all and the plot seemed all over the place.

I picked this book as it is a Booker prize winner. I felt disappointed reading it. I did not like the writing style and struggled to keep reading. Sorry.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

Girl, Woman, Other is an unconventional novel in the sense that it doesn’t have a plot, doesn’t have a particularly linear timeline, and doesn’t have a single focal character. What it is, essentially, is a collection of twelve different, loosely linked character studies that combine to create a sort of picture of black heritage in Britain.

The twelve narratives are grouped into four sets of three, each set has relatively tight connections with the others in that set, but the four sets are connected sometimes in tangential ways. Each narrative is fully and beautifully told, centring on a black woman but with a lively and diverse cast of supporting characters - sometimes generations of that character’s family, sometimes friends, sometimes employers or offspring.

Each of the twelve characters is sufficiently different to maintain interest and avoid any blurring between them. They range, for example, from a lesbian theatre dramatist, to a city banker, to a Northumbrian farmer, to a narcissistic schoolteacher. Some of the characters are more likeable than others, some of them are happier than others. Taken together, though, they challenge a number of pre-conceptions: e.g. that black skin was not seen in Britain before the Windrush; that the black community is somehow homogenous; that black kids have lower expectations than their white counterparts. We see in great detail the complexity of the backgrounds of many Black Britons; the systematic stifling of ambition and opportunity that Black kids experience; and the power of familial expectations and the perils of wanting something different from life.

Girl, Woman, Other does have a couple of codas. The first is an after party following the opening of a play by Amma, the star of the first narrative. This brings together some of the characters and offers an opportunity for some set-piece politicking. If the novel has a weak spot, this is it. The second coda is much more powerful, as one of the characters discovers her true heritage. The reader will already have worked this out, but the salient feature is more the character’s reaction than the actual fact of it.

This remarkable collection of narratives is dauntingly long to start with, but after the first two or three stories it is very hard to put down. It is written in a compelling, immediate style (almost verse like with line spacing and lack of capital letters), and gives a very convincing insight into lives that the reader might never have previously noticed. This is an important work that gives a better understanding of our country, and an appreciation that the story is still being written.

Girl, Woman, Other is beautifully written - only slightly on the prose side of freeverse - with a vast cast of related characters. What I particularly loved about this book, other than the style and the beauty of the writing, was the way in which it so cleverly showed not only how each character thought and felt, but also how they were seen and felt about by those around them. Their context in the wider web of the world and the people who make it up. I have never read a book which manages this so well, and it was a really special effect; gave the novel something more than just the sum of its parts. This is a novel about what it means to be black, yes, and about what it means to be female, or less female, but moreover it is a novel about what it means to be human, about the ties that bind and the inner workings of every life, the things that keep us together and keep us separate. I thought it would read like short stories, but because of the relationship each character has with the others, the structure came together as a novel despite its disparate voices.