Girl, Woman, Other

From one of Britain's most celebrated writers of color, Girl, Woman, Other is a magnificent portrayal of the intersections of identity and a moving and hopeful story of an interconnected group of Black British women. Winner of the 2019 Booker Prize and short-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize, 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.

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.