Girl, woman, other
/ Bernardine Evaristo
- New York : Grove Press , 2019
- 452 p. ; 22 cm
- Winner of The Booker Prize 2019 and the first black woman to receive this highest literary honor in the English language. .
Girl, Woman, Other is a celebration of the diversity of Black British experience. Moving, hopeful, and inventive, this novel is a vivid portrait of the state of contemporary Britain and the legacy of Britain's colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean. The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced 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, works hard to earn a degree from Oxford and becomes an 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 93-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.