Girl, Woman, Other spans over a hundred years, following the stories of twelve interlinked Black British women. For most people, this would be an impossible feat ending in a collapsed and hopelessly messy structure, but Bernardine Evaristo isn’t most people. She spins each story from the finest threads and deftly weaves them together.
A Booker Prize winner (2019), this book has deservedly had a lot of hype. There are countless reviews of it out there, but I absolutely had to add my own because this book: wow.
With its fragmented sentence structure and lack of capital letters and full stops, the book is almost like poetry. Adopting such a writing style along with the complex plot is a risky choice, but Evaristo more than pulls it off. My thought pattern quickly started to echo the style of the book, and that’s when you know a book’s got under your skin.
I was captured by the glimpses into each character’s story. Every time a character’s section ended and we moved onto the next one, I’d wish their particular story could have carried on for the rest of the book. That is, until I’d swiftly become grasped by the next character and their life.
Evaristo covers an impressive range of themes. Race, gender, friendships, and relationships are at the forefront, set against a background of today’s Britain seen from twelve very different perspectives. While we may only visit each character for a short time, each theme is explored in great depth and with such variety that you could almost imagine each character was written by a different author.
This book is important. It is a total must-read and I’m jealous of anyone who still has yet to read it for the first time!
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