By Emily Latimer
‘Girl, Women, Other’ is a moving, insightful and quite simply beautifully written novel. Bernardine Evaristo shows the complexity of being a woman, through twelve different generations, races and intersections of women whose narratives weave and form together to try to understand it.
Girl, Woman, Other is the eighth novel written by Bernardine Evaristo, published in 2019 by Hamish Hamilton. The book was the co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments and has received over 30 Book of the Year and Decade honours, alongside recognition as one of Barack Obama's Top 19 Books for 2019.
Furthermore, in June 2020 Evaristo became the first woman of colour and the first black British writer to get to number one in the UK paperback fiction charts, where she held the top spot for five weeks. Evaristo is also one of fewer than 30 black female professors in the UK out of around 20,000 professors overall. Both disappointing facts which only stress the importance of this book further.
Through reading the book I was reminded of Simone De Beauvoir’s quote that “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman,” as each character is depicted compromising and shaping parts of themselves to fulfil the roles pushed onto them; never allowed to be wholly complete. The stories span topics from sexual assault, abuse, marriage to having children.
But just as this is a novel about women, it is also a sweeping history of the black British experience and through the characters who are predominantly black, Evaristo shows England’s hidden prejudices and hierarchies painting a picture of contemporary Britain and our colonial past.
Each character is uniquely real with their flaws, quirks and qualities, some still carrying parts of their heritage, spanning from a mother and immigrant from Nigeria to a young grocery store worker who lives in Peckham. Through the close third-person narrative, lack of punctuation, and chapters that fold onto another, Evaristo allows you to feel like a ghost shifting into these women’s lives to help you truly understand them.
Ultimately, for anyone who wants a glimpse into multiple different worlds, ‘Girl, Women, Other’ is the book you should be reading.