A review by angelayoung
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

5.0

Bernadine Evaristo has performed a conjuring trick with Girl, Woman, Other: she tells the story through the voices, minds and hearts of twelve different people and each is absolutely distinct. So much so that, just as when you hear a friend's voice, or the voice of a member of your family, you know immediately who's speaking without any other identification. AND she's woven the threads of her novel through each of these narratives so that they connect naturally and, at the end, surprisingly. AND she uses a stylistic technique that allows her words to flow (no capital letters at the beginnings of paragraphs, each paragraph a sentence without a full stop, no punctuation marks) so the novel flows like a river whose gentle tides carried me along. See what I mean by conjuring trick?

I don't think I've ever read a novel told by so many voices, so many minds and so many hearts, so well. And I certainly haven't read one told by so many that unites into one single flowing whole so beautifully. Nor one that showed me worlds so very different from my own, simply through voice: the characters don't so much tell you their stories, they simply are their stories. Sometimes these stories are horrific, often they're funny, and always there are threads of compassion for different lives lived differently. No wonder Evaristo won the Booker for Girl, Woman, Other. It's brilliant.