Girl, Woman, Other

I cannot stop recommending this book to people, so I figured I should probably return to my book blog to write about it a little!!

Girl, Woman, Other is a stunning novel by British author Bernardine Evaristo that traces the lives of 12 Black British women. Everisto writes in a style that just pulls you in from the start — it’s almost poetry, but not quite. (Evaristo calls it “fusion fiction.”) Each chapter starts with a person’s name, and there are no real sentences, but fragments (kinda) that, together, read beautifully. The Times calls the novel “polyphonic,” involving many sounds or voices, and I love that descriptor. There’s no through plot, exactly; the book opens with Amma, a playwright, and the women who populate the rest of the pages all connect to her in some way, but just getting to know the lives of the women in Girl, Woman, Other is deeply satisfying — no through plot necessary. While all the stories center on being a Black woman in Britain, the women who populate the pages of the novel come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, have different sexualities, are different ages, have different histories, and so on. I just wish we could spend more time with each of them. As Evaristo explained, “I just had this idea that I would put as many women as I could into a single book and somehow connect it all through x degrees of separation and see what happened with that. In a sense, you could almost call it an activist novel.”

Here’s what I wrote in Alma, recommending the book as something to gift this Hanukkah:

This is possibly my favorite book of 2019. Bernardine Evaristo’s gorgeous novel — which won the prestigious Booker Prize this year — interweaves 12 stories of Black British women. The story begins with Amma, a playwright whose work focuses on her Black lesbian identity, and soon spirals out to her daughter, her oldest friend, and many, many more. Some stories you will think, how is this person related? As Evaristo explained, “It’s an experimental novel where each woman has her own space, and that’s what’s so important. I think the form is very important, because they’re not short stories, it is a single novel.” And the novel all comes together in a beautiful and deeply satisfying way.

Anyway, go read it.

Rating: ★★★★★

Get it here: https://amzn.to/2St1PZ5