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.

Girl, Woman, Other is an astounding novel. Through it Evaristo captures the multitude of female experience in modern Britain in a unique, innovative and moving story with an extraordinary structure.

Evaristo uses 12 different interconnected narrators, all women at different ages and stages of life, women across racial, sexual and generational divides, across huge geographical differences, from urban to rural, the UK to America. We get millenials and Boomers, not to mention Gen X. We see women from the LGBTQ+ community, as well as women from different class positions.

The depth that Evaristo manages to reach within a single novel is incredible. What is event more wonderful is how these stories all intertwine, not every character knows all the others, but we see them pop up, in other stories further down the line, and there is a joy in recognising a character you have met before. This also allows you to really stand in the shoes of others, as a character might have a really different portrayal when seen through someone else's eyes, yet when you see their life first hand, you get a completely different experience.

Within this tapestry of female experience, Evaristo seamlessly weaves a treatise on modern feminism, without ever become preachy. She stands back from the thoughts of her different characters, and is able to poke fun at some of the stereotypes of the modern era, but we are never laughing at her characters, just with them.

For all of the highly literary values, structure and style of the novel it is actually incredibly easy to and enjoyable to read. It is incredibly accessible and will be appealing to mainstream audiences. What Evaristo has done with this novel is hugely important. Instead of being a 'post-Brexit' novel about divisions and what we don't have in common, she has undertaken an exercise in empathy. She has shown us how to relate to each other, care about each other and how important those relationships are. This is the kind of book which will be come a classic of our time.

On the positive side, I really like the energy of Evaristo's writing - it's personable and fast, sharp and witty. But it's so constantly 'on' that I was yearning for some quiet time to offset all that frenetic pace. A bit more light and shade in the pace would have improved the book for me.

More importantly, while this book is being touted as representing black female experience in contemporary London, in actuality I'd say it operates in a fairly tight cliquey area: middle class by current status even if not by birth, queer, high-powered, super-successful, politically-active. Protagonists are a playwright at the National, a City banker, an academic so famous through his TV career that he can't be bothered to teach anymore, the next generation girls all extreme feminists (yay!) and all at uni. For this reason, the last lines "this is about being together" became almost ironic to me because the characters are so rarefied.

While there are inter-race relationships (Amma has two white lesbian lovers, for example), they're off-page: ok, there are enough white characters in the pages of fiction for me to accept this, but it feels like a wasted opportunity to embrace positive images of how race might work.

Similarly, characters have suffered real hardship in their pasts but it's often skimmed over in a matter of lines and then gone: there's a tendency to shallowness over depth, panorama instead of detail.

So despite some genuine freshness in the prose, I found this often frustrating - I wanted it all to slow down, to have more intricate engagement with characters and their specific lives, more precision and less panoramic life-story spilling over life-story in a handful of pages. But, then, that would have been a different book from the one Evaristo chose to write :)