Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


(The dizzying joy of finding a copy of this in the charity bookstore, when you’re still the 449302nd reservation on the library copy…)

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo is a novel of such utter articulacy that I scarce know how to handle it. In fact, I didn’t quite know how to handle it when I finished it and instead did an attractive ‘stare into the ether and realise that I’ll never write anything as good as this’ type thing, and then I got my act together and began to write this review. Because this is a book, a book of such utter craft and perfect skill that it’s almost a lesson in how to be brilliant. Confident, competent, crafted to within an inch of its life and never – ever – feeling overworked, this is a remarkable and wonderful thing.

It is mostly a story of women of colour, a story of identity and faith and peoplehood, a slow and subtle and rich investigation of what makes us the people we are, what makes us tell the stories we tell, what makes those stories live and love and survive. At one level, you could read Girl, Woman, Other as a collection of short stories – each focused on one individual – but then you realise that you can’t. They all reflect and cast light upon each other and, at the end, bring you home in a way that you could never have quite expected. It is beautiful, beautiful.

There is also pain here, and it is unflinchingly rendered. Women are angry, women hurt, women fight, women live. Feminisms are made and torn apart and remade. Evaristo handles it all with such an amazing skill that I’m made breathless by it; there is poetry, there is light, and at the worst moments, there is a restraint that peaks so much of her talent as a writer. It’s easy to overwrite something. It takes strength to pare a text back to the bones. A balance, found, hold. Savoured. It’s just – impressive. Utterly, utterly so.

(Finally. I do not see how this could ever share a prize for anything: it wins, it wins, it always wins.)



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