A fantastically rich novel. Evaristo is a master storyteller, weaving hundreds of years worth of history into one wholly satisfying narrative that both captures the past and present so vividly.

A powerful look at the lives of queer and WOC in Britain, of all generations. The voice in this is so strong, it's practically a masterclass in writing. I love Atwood, but this is better.

I have just finished this book and found it a struggle to get to the end and nearly gave up several times. I found the subject of the story very interesting in as much as a bird’s eye view of people of ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientation who struggle in this day and age which should not be the case. It explained all this very well and gave an insight to that struggle by some people which I found endearing and left me with a sadness in some cases. What I did not like was the jumping of the story from one group of people to another and sometimes when reading I was not sure who said what. I thought that towards the end I had a better understanding of the characters and was pleased I persevered with the book

Unusual writing style, but after 50 pages I enjoyed it. Needed a character list to identify the different people as numerous characters some with unusual names, one of those books where you think you will remember everyone but don't, so make a list as you go along and maybe a family tree.
Interaction between characters and links between them is very cleverly done, at the end all of the puzzles are tiresolved.. The difficulties the women face, rape, abandonment ,not being accepted transgender issues. and finding themselves are all well described.
Thank you for this insight and to NetGalley.

There isn't much I can say about this book that hasn't already been said. The perfect read, Evaristo's writing is exquisite and I fell in love with every single character.

OK so this has won the Booker Prize but I don't understand why. I found it rather dull and tough to engage with. Really not my type of thing. I understand that some love it so I suspect it's a 'marmite' type of writing... some will appreciate the literary excellence whist for others it does not hold our attention. Such is life and literature.

This was a good book covering all the aspects of today’s life. Through the eyes of 12 women interconnected with each other, I believe this book is relevant to understand what these different groups of people go through as well as the rejection they face every day. Thanks #Netgalley

Girl Woman Other by Bernadine Evaristo was the joint winner of the Booker prize in 2019. I thought I ought to read it even though it didn't appear to be my kind of book.
Half way through the first chapter I knew I'd made a mistake. The first character introduced is a black lesbian feminist theatre director (reorder those however you wish), I didn't think I was going to get to the end of this novel, Booker or not. But I did and I'm glad that I did.
Girl Woman Other is a series of sketches of women who are all interconnected. It gradually unfolds and folds in a narrative which comes full circle at the end. It's elegant and held my interest but overall it's not very rewarding and I can't see why it won the Booker.

I was keen to read this as a joint winner of the Booker Prize along with The Testaments (I'm a huge Atwood fan), however I don't feel I'm clever enough to do a review of this amazing book justice.

Beautifully crafted, expertly written, this is original and breathtakingly good.

5* +++++++

Thank you to NetGalley and to the Publisher for the opportunity to read this in exchange for an honest review.

Alright, everybody, it’s time to get literary!

I’ve been dying to read Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other ever since it came to my attention thanks to the Booker Prize. I mean, what’s not to love? It’s a book steeped in women’s experience and the experience of black and LGBTQ+ people in the UK, and it’s written in a refreshing, offbeat way, and it has a whole roster of awesome characters. Sign me up!

First thoughts?

I got my hands on this over the Christmas period. And boy, oh, boy, was it worth it. This is a vision of a modern Britain- and one that we don’t see all that much in literature- full of black voices from across the spectrum. As we hop from one person to another, we learn about the lived experiences of women from different backgrounds, different sexualities, different roots, families, jobs… it goes on.

Falling in love

Remarkably, this doesn’t create the chaos that you’d think it would. Instead, the voices of Evaristo’s characters come together to form a rich and fascinating tapestry that I couldn’t tear myself away from. Her style of writing is idiosyncatic; it’s written very much in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way. You get access to her characters’ thoughts as they pour out of their heads, giving us access either to a specific moment in time, or to a whole life story: it’s the perfect way of getting as much information across in as little time as possible. Though some paragraphs don’t quite click, the overall effect is does. It’s oddly lulling; by the end, I’d forgotten that this wasn’t the way every book was written.

Though you get to know some characters less well than you’d like, there’s enough here to make you fall in love with them. I particularly loved the way Evaristo leaped from character to character, working her way through a variety of people connected by friendship, family and love. There’s Morgan, the non-binary person whose great-grandmother is trying to find her long-lost daughter. There’s Amma, the lesbian playwright whose daughter, Jazz, is trying to find her voice as a ‘woke’ and politically engaged student.

Overall?

This is an epic book, both in scale and ambition. It compasses two hundred years of black history, a diorama of voices and serves as a perfect snapshot of modern life. It gives a voice to people who are definitely underrepresented in the literary canon and it’s an absorbing read to boot. Believe the hype.

Received this book with thanks to Netgalley and the publisher Hamish Hamilton. I really wanted to like this book for various reasons including it having won the Booker Prize, being written by an author who grew up near to where I grew up in SE London and from a similar background to me.

However, I really couldn't get into it and think that it's one of those stories where the blurb is much better than the actual story. Maybe I'm old fashioned when it comes to writing but the tenses jumped around way too much as did the grammar, with missing full stops and so on, which is a bugbear of mine.

I felt like the story was written in such a way that I couldn't tell whether it was based on a true story but even so there wasn't enough detail in there for it to be true.

It would market well to the LGBT community and is based on a love story between two women of colour though I don't that it does the people of colour community any good, especially the section of the book where a character is ranting on about how 'black' always has a bad representation such as in blackmail when they start to mention about how they don't even wear black underwear I had to stop.

It is interesting seeing the amount of 5* reviews though I guess that's what sets us all apart as reviews. Just wasn't for me.

....I've noticed a reference to 12 characters and I may have read only a few of these so may look on. The grammar still makes the book tough to perservere with. I might check out the Margaret Atwood option to see how that compares.

Loved it!

Each of the characters is carefully crafted, with their own distinct outlines in what otherwise is a blur of different people. I just adored the connections between the characters; their lives intertwined in the way which we all have but are usually unaware.

A beautiful book celebrating the lives of black women across the UK over the last 100 years. The stories entwine and are cleverly woven together.

Believe all of the amazing things that you have been hearing about this book.

The way that all of the stories interlink is just breathtaking.

What an incredible book ! I am not surprised at all that this won the Man Booker Prize.

I've never read a book that spans so many characters and Evaristo manages to do it so effortlessly. All the characters get their moment, and despite only having a chapter or so dedicated to them their different personalities and stories feel so real and authentic it's surprising this isn't non-fiction! Their stories interweave and interlink until the end where it all comes together in a beautiful final two chapters.

It was so good I could read it again. I recommend to anyone who enjoys reading about life stories, family dynamics and women.

This is different to anything I have read before. It is almost a collection of short stories, about women but the stories are interlaced (very clever). I will be recommending this book to Book Club as it’s ripe for discussions and debates.

Outstanding and utterly original, this book examines every facet of what it is to be a black woman in Britain - and oh, how glorious it is. I didn't start out by feeling like that, however. Never have I been so put off by an opening chapter only to fall so completely head over heels in love with the rest of the narrative. The problem was that initially I found the lack of punctation difficult to navigate. I’ve read books like this before, ones making statements about how they are not going to be constrained by form. It’s going to worthy and self-conscious, I thought, a feeling compounded by the fact that the first character that Bernardine Evaristo visits is Amma - who was my least favourite character. I kept the faith though and carried on, and as soon as I arrived in the next chapter, I was won over. I didn’t even notice the lack of punctuation then because the prose flowed like a poem.

In some ways, this a book that should not work; aside from the punctuation, it is all told. Bernardine Evaristo brings us a series of talking heads who report what has happened to them rather than plunging us into scenes. Writers are often instructed to ‘show’ not ‘tell’ because so few writers can tell well. Bernardine Evaristo is a supremo at telling. This combined with the way she weaves her story back and forth through time are just a few of the reasons that this is a truly original novel, a real literary great.

The characters get better and better - each has a distinct voice which doesn’t so much as lift off the page as pole-vaults off it. Through them, we get to experience every facet of human emotion - the harrowing aftermath of rape, the way a mother refuses to let her child drown under the weight of mental health problems, an enthusiastic young teacher ground down after years of the relentless ungratefulness of her pupils who she constantly tries to mould better futures for. But this is no depressing novel, it is uplifting, beautiful and the humour is abundant and effortless. A wonderful moment was Hattie’s failure to grasp her grandchild’s non-binary status, calling her friends ‘those non binding people’ yet she has huge love for her grandchild and her friends nonetheless.

I read this book on my Kindle, but will be buying the paperback as soon as it comes out. It should be required reading in schools, but perhaps that might take some of the joy out of it. I can certainly see it spawning a thousand English Literature degree theses. A book that deserves to be pushed into the hands of everyone, it feels like its pages contain the whole world.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo is a beautiful, hopeful book. I loved the intertwined stories and consider this a worthy winner of the Booker Prize.

This is a beautiful, poetic, piece of writing that gives the reader a glimpse of a Britain that most of us hardly ever experience and is not often written about. Sweeping in its breadth and ambition, this novel is a celebration of the lives of black women, in all their multiplicity, throughout the United Kingdom and the last one hundred years.

This is a story of black Britain, its past, its present and its future, told through the inter-connected, interlocking, overlapping lives of twelve women. A panoramic novel in which we hear the voices, and learn the stories, of a wide range of women that all differ, one from another, in their ages, vocations, social backgrounds, locations, and sexuality. We hear the stories of their struggles to build their lives in this, predominately white, predominately male country, stories of mothers and daughters, children and adults, stories that are imbued with love, joy and imagination.

These stories are told in four lengthy chapters that each deal with three of the twelve women. The first of these women is Amma a socialist, lesbian, playwright. Amma has worked on the fringes of theatre for many years, never willing to make the compromises necessary to ensure a successful mainstream career. But now she finds that society has moved in her direction, and she has become mainstream, and her latest radical feminist musical “The Last Amazon of Dahomey” is opening at the National Theatre. From Amma’s story we are drawn into those of the other eleven characters. They are all very different, some of them are flawed and complicated characters, but in almost all their stories there is, as well as the struggle, empathy, love, gentleness, belonging and forgiveness.


The final chapter shows us the after party following the premiere of Amma’s musical. It brings together some of the twelve women and several of the many subsidiary characters that we have met along the way. The novel ends with a surprising and rather touching coda that brings together two more of the women whose stories we have encountered earlier in the novel.
As male, pale and decidedly stale I am guessing that I am not seen as being part of the target demographic for this novel. To say that this novel, with the diversity of its characters and the range of circumstances they find themselves dealing with, is wide-ranging would be something of an understatement. It covers aspects of life in Britain that I recognise but rather more about which I know next to nothing. I found this book a fascinating, compelling read and by the time I had finished it I felt that it had taught me a lot that was new to me about the Britain in which I live. Highly recommended.

I would like to express my thanks to NetGalley Hamish Hamilton and Penguin Books UK for making a free download of this book available to me.

What a genius Bernardine Evaristo is! Absolutely loved this book and would recommend to anyone. If you havent read it yet what are you waiting for?