Girl, Woman, Other
by Bernardine Evaristo
Summary
Twelve people, mostly Black British women, mostly connected to each other in ways the reader works out gradually. A playwright whose first National Theatre production opens on the night the book begins. Her daughter. A banker. A cleaner. A teacher approaching retirement who taught several of the others. A nonbinary social media influencer. A ninety three year old farmer in the north east.
Each gets a chapter, and the chapters are stories rather than fragments: you get a whole life, told quickly and without condescension, and then you move on. The pleasure is in the connections surfacing sideways, so a minor figure in one section turns out to be the centre of the next.
Evaristo writes in what she calls fusion fiction, which in practice means almost no full stops and a layout closer to verse than prose. It looks daunting on the page and stops being daunting after about three pages, because the rhythm is doing the punctuation's job.
It is warm, extremely readable and much funnier than its reputation as an important book suggests. It is also unusual in refusing to make its characters agree with each other: the generational arguments about feminism, race and identity are given to people who are all sympathetic and all convinced, and Evaristo declines to referee.
This is one of the most approachable prize winners of recent years, and an excellent reading group choice precisely because the twelve lives give everyone someone to defend. The final chapter, which resolves a connection the reader has been half assembling throughout, is worth the wait.
Historical Context & Significance
Girl, Woman, Other shared the Booker Prize in 2019 with Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, and the circumstances were extraordinary.
The rules had been changed after the 1992 tie expressly to forbid splitting the prize, and the 2019 judges were told directly that they could not do it. After five hours they voted, could not reach a consensus, and refused. Chair Peter Florence relayed the decision, and the matter went to Baroness Helena Kennedy, chair of the trustees, before a shared award was announced. It was only the third tie in the prize's history, after 1974 and 1992.
Bernardine Evaristo became the first Black woman to win the Booker. Much of the coverage that followed focused on Atwood, a fact Evaristo has since discussed directly, and the shared prize remains argued over as a result.