“A choral love song to black womanhood.” Elle (London)
Winner of an AudioFile Earphones AwardWinner of the 2019 Booker PrizeWinner of the Indie Book Award in FictionShortlisted for the 2019 Gordon Burn PrizeShortlisted for the Dublin Literary AwardShortlisted for the Glass Bell AwardFinalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ FictionLonglisted for the Orwell PrizeA Vogue Best Book of 2019 in FictionA Financial Times Best Book of the Year in FictionAn Entertainment Weekly Best Books of the Year selectionA BookRiot Pick of the Best AudiobooksA Barack Obama Reading List Pick of the YearOne of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of the Year in FictionA Literary Hub Pick of Favorite Books of the YearA Shelf Awareness Best Book of the YearAn Audible Pick of This Month's Listener FavoritesAn Entertainment Weekly Pick for Best Books of the MonthAn Amazon Best Book of the MonthA Midwest Indie Bestseller in FictionA Millions.com Pick of the MonthA Bustle Pick of the Month's Best BooksA Refinery29 Pick for the Best Books of the MonthAn Electric Literature Pick of Highly Anticipated Queer BooksA CBC Pick for Your Winter Reading ListSee All +
From one of Britain’s most celebrated writers of color comes a magnificent portrayal of the intersections of identity and a moving and hopeful story of an interconnected group of Black British women.
Girl, Woman, Other paints a vivid portrait of the state of post-Brexit Britain, as well as looking back to the legacy of Britain’s colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean.
The twelve central characters of this multivoiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her Black lesbian identity; her old friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades of work in London’s funding-deprived schools; Carole, one of Shirley’s former students, is a successful investment banker; Carole’s mother Bummi works as a cleaner and worries about her daughter’s lack of rootedness despite her obvious achievements. From a nonbinary social media influencer to a ninety-three-year-old woman living on a farm in Northern England, these unforgettable characters also intersect in shared aspects of their identities, from age to race to sexuality to class.
Sparklingly witty and filled with emotion, centering voices we often see othered, and written in an innovative fast-moving form that borrows technique from poetry, Girl, Woman, Other is a polyphonic and richly textured social novel that shows a side of Britain we rarely see, one that reminds us of all that connects us to our neighbors, even in times when we are encouraged to be split apart.
Praise
“A choral love song to black womanhood.” Elle (London)
“Evaristo has a gift for appraising the lives of her
characters with sympathy and grace while gently skewering some of their
pretensions.” New York Times
“Nuanced and entertaining…Told from the point of view of twelve British women of color—all just a few degrees of separation apart from each other.” NPR
“Readers…will be entertained, educated, and riveted.” Booklist (starred review)
“Evaristo beguiles with her exceptional depictions of a range of experiences of black British women…A stunning powerhouse of vibrant characters and heartbreaks.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“As she creates a space for immigrants and the children of immigrants to tell their stories…there is room for everyone to find a home in this extraordinary novel.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Voices of black women come to the fore in a swirl of interrelated stories that cover the past century of British life.” Sunday Times (London)
“Nabirye projects the characters superbly: she has a full, low timbre and a powerful directness.” London Times (audio review)
“It takes a talented narrator to capture the voices of all these different people, and Nabirye does each one perfectly.” BookRiot (starred audio review)
“A breathtaking symphony of black women’s voices, a clear-eyed survey of contemporary challenges that’s nevertheless wonderfully life-affirming.” Washington Post
“Nabirye’s warm, rhythmic voice embraces listeners from the first rush of words…and pulls you onto the merry-go-round of personalities and stories. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.” AudioFile
“The intermingling stories of generations of black British women told in a gloriously rich and readable free verse will surely be seen as a landmark in British fiction.” The Guardian (London)
“A sparkling new novel of interconnected stories…If you want to understand modern-day Britain, this is the writer to read.” New Statesman
“Brims with vitality…She captures the shared experience that make us, as she puts it in her dedication, ‘members of the human family.’" Financial Times (London)
Bernardine Evaristo is the Anglo-Nigerian award-winning author of several books of fiction and verse fiction, including the novel Girl, Woman, Other, which won the 2019 Booker Prize. She is the first Black woman to ever have received the Booker Prize. She is professor of creative writing at Brunel University London and vice chair of the Royal Society of Literature. Her writing is characterized by experimentation, daring, and subversion, challenging the myths of various Afro-diasporic histories and identities, and her books range in genre from poetry to short story to drama to criticism. Her books have been chosen as a book of the year thirteen times by British media, and her novel The Emperor’s Babe was a London Times Book of the Decade.
Narrator Bio
Overview
Winner of an AudioFile Earphones AwardWinner of the 2019 Booker PrizeWinner of the Indie Book Award in FictionShortlisted for the 2019 Gordon Burn PrizeShortlisted for the Dublin Literary AwardShortlisted for the Glass Bell AwardFinalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ FictionLonglisted for the Orwell PrizeA Vogue Best Book of 2019 in FictionA Financial Times Best Book of the Year in FictionAn Entertainment Weekly Best Books of the Year selectionA BookRiot Pick of the Best AudiobooksA Barack Obama Reading List Pick of the YearOne of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of the Year in FictionA Literary Hub Pick of Favorite Books of the YearA Shelf Awareness Best Book of the YearAn Audible Pick of This Month's Listener FavoritesAn Entertainment Weekly Pick for Best Books of the MonthAn Amazon Best Book of the MonthA Midwest Indie Bestseller in FictionA Millions.com Pick of the MonthA Bustle Pick of the Month's Best BooksA Refinery29 Pick for the Best Books of the MonthAn Electric Literature Pick of Highly Anticipated Queer BooksA CBC Pick for Your Winter Reading ListSee All +
From one of Britain’s most celebrated writers of color comes a magnificent portrayal of the intersections of identity and a moving and hopeful story of an interconnected group of Black British women.
Girl, Woman, Other paints a vivid portrait of the state of post-Brexit Britain, as well as looking back to the legacy of Britain’s colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean.
The twelve central characters of this multivoiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her Black lesbian identity; her old friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades of work in London’s funding-deprived schools; Carole, one of Shirley’s former students, is a successful investment banker; Carole’s mother Bummi works as a cleaner and worries about her daughter’s lack of rootedness despite her obvious achievements. From a nonbinary social media influencer to a ninety-three-year-old woman living on a farm in Northern England, these unforgettable characters also intersect in shared aspects of their identities, from age to race to sexuality to class.
Sparklingly witty and filled with emotion, centering voices we often see othered, and written in an innovative fast-moving form that borrows technique from poetry, Girl, Woman, Other is a polyphonic and richly textured social novel that shows a side of Britain we rarely see, one that reminds us of all that connects us to our neighbors, even in times when we are encouraged to be split apart.