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Blonde Roots
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  • Published: 20 August 2020
  • ISBN: 9780141917573
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

Blonde Roots

From the Booker prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other

Formats & editions
Paperback
16 July 2020
EBook
20 Aug 2020
Audiobook
16 July 2020
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A dazzlingly imaginative reversal of the slave trade, in which the Africans are the masters and the Europeans the slaves

Welcome to a world turned upside down. One minute, Doris is playing hide-and-seek with her sisters in the fields behind their cottage. The next, someone puts a bag over her head and she ends up in the hold of a slave ship sailing to the New World.

When she finally arrives on a strange tropical island, Doris discovers that she is, in fact, a pig-ugly savage with a brain the size of a pea, whose only purpose in life is to please her mistress. While experiencing the hardships of life in the sugarcane fields, she dreams of escape, of finding those she has loved and lost, and of returning home to her motherland, England . . .
  • Published: 20 August 2020
  • ISBN: 9780141917573
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272
Categories:

About the author

Bernardine Evaristo

Bernardine Evaristo, MBE, is the award-winning author of eight books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other made her the first black woman to win the Booker Prize in 2019, as well winning the Fiction Book of the Year Award at the British Book Awards in 2020, where she also won Author of the Year, and the Indie Book Award. She also became the first woman of colour and black British writer to reach No.1 in the UK paperback fiction chart in 2020. In 2025 she was awarded the Women's Prize Outstanding Contribution Award. Her other awards and honours include an MBE in 2009 and an OBE in 2020. Her writing spans reviews, essays, drama and radio, and she has edited and guest-edited national publications, including The Sunday Time's Style magazine. Bernardine is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University, London, and President of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in London with her husband. www.bevaristo.com
BE

Also by Bernardine Evaristo

The Emperor's Babe
Mr Loverman
Manifesto
Penguin Readers Level 7: Girl, Woman, Other (ELT Graded Reader)
Girl, Woman, Other
Bernardine Evaristo: A BBC Radio Collection
Hello Mum
See all

Praise for Blonde Roots

A phenomenal book. It is so ingenious and so novel. Think The Handmaid's Tale meets Noughts and Crosses with a bit of Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll thrown in. This should be thought of as a feminist classic.

Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast

A hugely imaginative tale that invites important debates, challenging fundamental perceptions of race, culture and history

Independent on Sunday

This brilliant novel will fulfil [Evaristo's] purpose of making readers view the transatlantic slave trade with fresh eyes

The Times

Reimagines past and present with refreshing humour and intelligence . . . human and real

Guardian

[Blonde Roots] is a powerful gesture of fearless thematic ownership by one of the UK's most unusual and challenging writers

Independent

As with a Swiftean satire, Evaristo's novel is powerful not for its fantastical elements but for its ability to bring home the horror of historical events

Financial Times

Evaristo remains an undeniably bold and energetic writer, whose world-view is anything but one-dimensional

Sunday Times

One of Britain's most innovative authors . . . Bernardine Evaristo always dares to be different

New Nation