Girl, Woman, Other – Bernardine Evaristo (2019)

Joint winner of the 2019 Booker prize just over a week ago, Girl, Woman, Other is the eighth novel by Bernardine Evaristo. I am pleased to see – if social media is anything to go by – that lots more people are buying and reading her books than had been previously. I am one of them, although I did already own this book when it was awarded the prize. I had bought it in the summer having seen it on Twitter – the stunning cover art, along with the title first got my attention, the premise sealed the deal. Then, when it came to it, I wasn’t in the mood to read it. In the end I began reading it the day after it won The Booker. I am so glad I saved it – I absolutely loved it. I am now more than ready to read more novels by Bernardine Evaristo, especially Mr Loverman – which I just love the sound of.

I know so many people are reading this novel at the moment – so, I am doing my best to avoid spoilers.

A novel of modern Britain and some of the women who make it – their voices ring out clear and strong from every page. Twelve wonderful humans, mainly women, mainly black, scattered across the UK in town and country, who call this nation home.  The author weaves their stories together in a way that produces a glorious feeling of connectedness, some characters are connected slightly – other connections are more significant. Through these characters, we see everything we are as a country and all that we have been.

Here are stories of family, friendship, ambition and achievement, sexuality and gender.  There are five longish chapters – each chapter introducing us to three of the twelve key characters. They represent many of the people who make up Britain today, from a variety of backgrounds they carry their different experiences with them.

The novel opens with Amma, a woman who has come a long way since her squat sharing days in the 1980s, now she has a play opening at the National, she’s made it. She can’t help but look back at the days when she was preparing to smash the patriarchy, she took no prisoners, and had many lesbian lovers.

“Amma then spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbing hand grenades at the establishment that excluded her”

until the mainstream began to absorb what was once radical and she found herself hopeful of joining it”

Her daughter Yazz is fast becoming a young woman, she’ll be heading off to make her way in the world soon. We meet Dominique – a friend of Amma’s from those old days when they were experimenting with new feminist theatre. Dominique has spent years in America but couldn’t miss Amma’s big night.

Past and present merge in the stories that follow, in 1905 Newcastle, ten year old Grace is an orphan, placed in a home. She remembers the stories that her mother told of the enigmatic Abyssinian who was her father – a man she will never meet.

“it took a long time for Grace to stop hoping Ma might turn up and even longer before she stopped feeling her as a warmth spreading in her stomach whenever she thought of her

longer still for her features to fade

at night she began to dream of her Pa

who’d come back to rescue her

and take her to paradise”

She longs to work in the smart department stores – who when she is older refuse to hire her.

In the 1950s Winsome arrived from Barbados, met and married and followed her young fisherman husband to Cornwall. She realises right away that Cornwall aren’t ready for them – and is afraid her husband has made a big mistake, and perhaps she did too.

Carole made it to Oxford university from her Peckham comprehensive school while her mother worked as a cleaner.

“…Bummi dragged herself out of bed

to join her tribe of bleary-eyed workers who emerged into the dimmed streetlights of her new city to clamber aboard the red double-decker buses that ploughed the empty streets

  she sat in sleepy silence with others who had hoped for a better life in this country, huddled in her eiderdown jacket in winter, her feet in padded boots, longing to sleep, afraid to miss the stop for the office building where she scraped away hardened faecal matter in toilet bowls and disinfected everything that came into contact with human waste”

In Northumberland, Morgan; who used to be Megan visits Hattie, who despite being in her nineties remains in the farmhouse where she has lived so long. She remembers when she was young and strong but is determined to retain her independence, she still misses her husband Slim every day. Morgan; has left the city behind and embraced the countryside, they have a million Twitter followers.

Evaristo writes in an experimental style in which sentences are not marked in the usual way with a capital letter and full stop but with line breaks allowing her prose to feel poetry like at times. The entire novel is very readable. A wonderfully polyphonic novel that speaks strongly of modern Britain. It is of course, a very worthy Booker  winner.