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Tim O'Brien

741. Bernadine Evaristo - Girl, Woman, Other


A library book of Paddy's – we think this may have shared the Booker Prize with the new Margret Atwood.

Predominantly, it initially appeared , about gay black women in London, but really a history of black women’s experience in the UK over the last 100 or so years.

I thought it was brilliant; it kept reminding me of Middlemarch, although the books are structurally and thematically quite different. In this, each chapter focuses on a single individual, but they are so richly drawn, despite the absence of punctuation (which doesn’t matter at all once you get used to it) that the flavour of the character and their life emerges (imagine Middlemarch re-written with the whole Dorothea life experience in chapter 1, Lydgate in chapter 2 etc, and other characters in later chapters dip in and out and then re-emerging in their own chapter). Excellent – I will find more by her.


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