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  • Published: 3 March 2020
  • ISBN: 9780241984994
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $26.00

Girl, Woman, Other

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019




Teeming with energy, humour and heart, a love song to black Britain told by twelve very different people

Grace is a Victorian orphan dreaming of the mysterious African father she will never meet.

Winsome is a young Windrush bride, recently arrived from Barbados.

Amma is the fierce queen of her 1980s squatters' palace.

Morgan, who used to be Megan, is blowing up on social media, the newest activist-influencer on the block.

Twelve very different people, mostly black and female, more than a hundred years of change, and one sweeping, vibrant, glorious portrait of contemporary Britain. Bernardine Evaristo presents a gloriously new kind of history for this old country: ever-dynamic, ever-expanding and utterly irresistible.

  • Published: 3 March 2020
  • ISBN: 9780241984994
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $26.00

About the author

Bernardine Evaristo

Bernardine Evaristo is the author of Lara, winner of the Emma Best Book Award in 1999, The Emperor's Babe and Soul Tourists. She is a former Poet in Residence at the Museum of London, and her work has been widely anthologized. She won a prestigious Arts Council Writers Award in 2000.

Also by Bernardine Evaristo

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Praise for Girl, Woman, Other

Weaves through time and space with crackling originality

Vogue

Exuberant, bursting at the seams in delightful ways... Evaristo continues to expand and enhance our literary canon. If you want to understand modern day Britain, this is the writer to read

New Statesman

An exceptional book that unites poetry, social history, women's voices and beyond. Order it right now

Stylist

Evaristo's prose hums with life as characters seem to step off the page fully formed. At turns funny and sad, tender and true, this book deserves to win awards

Red

Brims with vitality

FT

With this rich composition, Evaristo deserves a toast

Literary Review

Masterful... A choral love song to black womanhood in modern Great Britain

Elle

'Girl, Woman, Other is about struggle, but it is also about love, joy and imagination.

Guardian

Beautifully interwoven stories of identity, race, womanhood, and the realities of modern Britain. The characters are so vivid, the writing is beautiful and it brims with humanity.

Nicola Sturgeon via Twitter

Threads together the diverse life stories of 12 black British women in ways that deliberately resist categorisation

Metro

Such a satisfying read, funny and true, the characters are so real you feel you know them already

Miranda Sawyer via Twitter

A warm, humorous and ambitious novel, and one that is enjoyably playful in style. It is both a product of its time and unlike any book ever written about Britain

Economist

My favorite book of 2019 . . . the most absorbing book I read all year. This novel is a master class in storytelling. It is absolutely unforgettable. When I turned the final page, I felt the ache of having to leave the world Evaristo created but I also felt the excitement of getting to read the book all over again. It should have won the Booker alone. It deserves all the awards and then some.

Roxanne Gay

Give [Evaristo] more prizes! All the prizes! It has the pace of a whistle stop tour and yet it seems no detail of the myriad of lives we encounter is missed.

Graham Norton via Twitter

If you haven't discovered [Evaristo] yet, I urge you to read all and any of her books. Devoured one a day already and ordered more. Hilarious, compassionate, moving and brutally honest.

Richard E Grant via Twitter

'Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo is the best book in recent years to have embodied the idea that there are as many ways to be joyful as there are to be Black. Polyphonic and nuanced, it celebrates the lives of Black British women rather than commiserating with them, which is a crucial - and rare - distinction.'

Sara Collins