Girl, Woman, Other

"Winner"

"It’s written in a very unusual way. It has, I suppose, a poetic structure; she uses blank verse a lot. She plays with the lives of 12 black women in Britain, and there are plot twists—which I don’t want to spoil—about their connections. Again, you get the sense in this book of real lives lived. They feel so vibrant, so vivid, and so full of energy and life that it’s like coming across a whole new bunch of friends who you care about deeply. You also realize that these are people who are not very familiar from contemporary literature. They haven’t had their stories told so brilliantly and so persuasively before now. I cannot imagine anyone not enjoying this novel. As an author she possesses a prolific voice; she’s got 12 voices, all of which are distinct and engaging and vulnerable in different ways and utterly compelling. It’s so tough. The move from longlist to shortlist has the bizarreness of being reductive, not expansive, and that feels strange for someone who spends their bulk of their professional life trying to celebrate more and more literature. The thing I would say about all these six novels is that I could easily and happily stand up and make the case for any of them as a winner, and I have no idea who’s going to win in the follow-up on the 14th. I hope that we will discover more about each of the books when we get to talk about them again, in this third reading of them."

"Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other is about connection. It tracks 12 characters, mostly black, British women, of different generations, political opinions, classes, faiths and heritages as they move through one another’s worlds and times. Each person is drawn out in their own chapter, but their stories interweave: Some are friends, family or lovers, while others simply happen to be at the same show or argue on Twitter. It’s a surprising and funny read, full of raw human experience. There is no overarching story, but one emerges anyway: Girl, Woman, Other is deeply about humanness, heart and the things that ultimately unite us all."

"It’s kind of a multigenerational novel about Black families in London and it’s kind of this weird, all-lower-case stream of consciousness thing. So it looks very daunting, but it’s actually really readable. It’s really great."