Girl, Woman, Other

I came to this one late on a rainy Sunday with tea going cold beside me, and I stayed up far past when I meant to stop. I had heard so much prize noise that I expected something stiff. It is not that at all. Girl, Woman, Other feels talky and crowded, like walking into a party where you know one person and leave knowing eleven more. My copy is the Black Cat 2019 edition, all 464 pages, and by page fifty I had stopped noticing the odd layout and was just following voices.

What pulled me in was how close Evaristo stays to each woman. She lets them loop and drift and remember something from twenty years ago while making dinner. I liked that at once, though I wanted more time with some before being passed on. If you like one hero for three hundred pages, this will feel restless. If you like listening in, you will have a great time.

The set up is simple to hold while the cast grows. Amma, a Black lesbian playwright in London after years in small rooms, finally gets a full production at the National Theatre. Opening night of her play about Black Amazons is the anchor. Everyone else ties to that night as family or friend or guest, and Evaristo moves outward from Amma and back for drinks after. I kept that premiere in mind as home base.

Amma, Yazz and Dominique hold the door open

Amma gives the book its charge. In her fifties on premiere night, she paces backstage at the National Theatre in London, furious and thrilled. Evaristo gives her past in pieces. Squats in Kings Cross with Dominique. Street theatre. Busking. Fights with funders who wanted her softer. A daughter, Yazz, raised among women and books and arguments. Amma can be prickly and funny about herself, and I liked her more because Evaristo lets her stay difficult.

Yazz is nineteen and full of opinions. She loves her mum and rolls her eyes at her, often in the same paragraph. Her scenes with friends sound right. They argue about feminism and pronouns, and Yazz can be self righteous in the way clever nineteen year olds can be. Then she goes quiet visiting her dad or realizing what Amma gave up to raise her. I recognized that swing between certainty and doubt.

Dominique completes that first circle. She and Amma were inseparable in their twenties. Then Dominique left for America with Nzinga and ended up in a relationship that slowly closed around her. No big fight scene. Just rules about dress and friends and money until she hardly knows herself. When she leaves, it is quiet and brave. I thought about her for a long time after.

What Evaristo does with form shows up right away. She calls it fusion fiction, and on the page it looks like poetry that changed its mind. Lines break where breath breaks. Sentences start lower case. Commas and periods are light. After thirty pages I stopped wanting normal paragraphs. The style keeps voices fluid, and lets Amma sound like Amma and Yazz like Yazz. I will say plainly that it tired me in places. When sleepy, I lost the thread and reread. A friend who likes clear grammar quit at page sixty. I get that.

Carole and Bummi answer back across class and migration

Carole is the kind you want to shake and hug. She grows up on a Peckham estate with her Nigerian mother Bummi, gets into Oxford, and lands in the City with sharp suits and a flat nothing like home. Evaristo writes Oxford well. Tutorials where Carole feels behind on references. Parties where she smiles while asked where she is really from. Hard work that gets her noticed and costs sleep. Then banking floors where success means longer hours and harder skin.

There is a darker thread I will not spoil, except to say it involves an assault after a work event and how she shuts it away to keep moving. Evaristo never reduces her to that event. We see Carole choosing husband Freddy, choosing to strive, choosing to show up for her mother through misunderstanding. I admired her control, and felt angry at how much she needs just to stand still.

Bummi gets her own space, and I was glad. She came from Nigeria with plans, lost a husband, cleaned offices, built a cleaning business, prayed and scolded and loved hard. Her chapters about 1990s Peckham and trips back to Nigeria carry food and church and gossip. Her fights with Carole about respect and money felt true. Bummi thinks Carole looks down on home. Carole thinks Bummi cannot see what London asks of a young Black woman in the City. Both are right and hurt. Their short loaded calls stayed with me.

These two show class plainly. Evaristo stays close to rent and school fees and who must send money home. Bummi counts pounds. Carole counts bonuses and mortgages. Neither scale erases the other.

LaTisha and Shirley stay and fight in the same streets

After Carole, LaTisha brings us back to the estate. She was Carole's schoolmate, bright and mouthy, and life took her another way. Retail on Oxford Street, kids young, men who come and go, long shifts and late buses. Some readers skim her because she does not leave Peckham. That misses the point. Evaristo gives her wit. Her view of customers, her pride in kids, her memory of school with Carole, her refusal to be pitied, all carry weight. When she meets Carole years later, the awkwardness is perfect. Old affection, new distance.

Shirley is the bridge. A Black teacher in South London who stayed when others left. Her chapters are marking and parents evenings and staff room politics. A marriage to a man who loves her and drives her mad. Shirley is tired and principled, though she misjudges younger women and her own daughter. I liked that she is no saint. She misreads LaTisha. She gets things wrong at home. She keeps showing up.

Together they ask what success means if you stay. Neither gets a National Theatre night, yet both shape girls who will sit there. I slowed here, not from drag but domestic detail. Bus routes. School corridors smelling of polish and chips. If you need twists every ten pages, you may fidget. I did not.

Winsome and Penelope widen the lens on age and secrets

Winsome arrives like a gust. In her nineties in Barbados after a life that started in Jamaica and passed through England, she talks of lovers and children and work with a frankness that made me laugh out loud. There is a scene where she dresses for a party and checks the mirror that I loved. She will not shrink.

Penelope seems opposite at first. White, sixtyish, Home Counties, married, retired teacher, raffle runner. Her chapter starts comfortable then tilts. Adopted and told late, she searches for her birth mother, opening questions about claim and blood. I will not give away what she finds. Evaristo treats her with care, not scorn. She has said thoughtless things. She has lived a decent constrained life and wants truth before too late. Her husband's confusion felt real.

Pairing them matters. Winsome lived across empires and islands. Penelope lived without knowing her start. Side by side they stop identity seeming simple. They bring age into a book that could stay young, recalling buses and dance halls and maternity wards. My gripe is I wanted more Winsome. Just as I settled in, we moved on. That thin feeling, meeting someone vivid and leaving too soon, is the book's trade off and it hit me here first.

Megan and Morgan, Hattie and the farm that holds history

Megan, who later lives as Morgan, brings gender to the front. We meet Megan as a teen in a conventional home, guarded, closer to grandmother Hattie than parents. Small refusals. Skirts. Hair. Games that feel like acting. Late night forums where language fits. Living as Morgan, using they in some spaces and he in others, Evaristo stays with texture. Haircuts. The first time a stranger gets it right. A mother who tries and fails and tries again. A father gone quiet.

Morgan's bond with Hattie is the heart. Hattie gets it faster than the parents, not from theory but long life. She offers room and blunt welcome. That matters more than speeches.

Hattie is a treat. Ninety three, lesbian, farmer in the north, holding land she fought to keep when women were not meant to run farms. Mud and rain. Wartime memories, lost lovers, village ways. Her choice over the farm's future drives one of the few will-like plots. I loved her plain speech after city talk.

My criticism here is Morgan sometimes feels sketched next to Amma or Bummi. Key moments rather than months of dailiness. With 464 pages for twelve lives, some rush makes sense, but I felt it. Hattie feels whole in fewer pages because her voice is so distinct.

Grace and the after party tie the threads

Grace is the last full portrait, and she reaches furthest back. She is based in part on Evaristo's own mother stories, a Black woman who came to Britain in an earlier wave and made a life through teaching and community work and church and sheer persistence. Grace's chapters move between past and present, between memory and the headaches of being older in a country that still mispronounces your name. She remembers dances and front rooms and racism on the bus rendered polite and cold. She remembers raising children who grew up more British than she will ever feel, and loving them through that gap.

What Grace gives the book is softness without weakness. She forgives a lot but she does not forget. She notices. When she is invited to Amma's after party at the National Theatre, she almost does not go. Too late. Too much noise. Too far. She goes anyway, and that choice lets Evaristo bring everyone into one room for the close.

The after party is my favorite set piece. After hundreds of pages of separate lives, we get heat and music and bad wine and people craning to see who is who. Amma is buzzing and exhausted, hugging Dominique like she will not let go, checking where Yazz has got to, fielding praise from people who ignored her for decades. Yazz holds court with friends and then slips off to call someone she likes. Carole arrives with Freddy, scanning the room for exits out of habit before she lets herself enjoy it. Bummi wears something bright and tells someone exactly what she thinks of the play. LaTisha gets a babysitter and dances. Shirley talks shop with another teacher and then dances too. Winsome would have danced if she were there in body, and in a way her spirit is there in the older women holding court by the bar. Penelope stands awkward near the edge until someone kind draws her in. Morgan leans against a wall with Hattie's ring on a chain, watching. Hattie would hate the canapes and love the noise. Grace sits for a bit, then stands, then finds Amma and says the thing Amma needed to hear.

Evaristo does not force neat reunions. Not everyone meets. Not every rift heals. The point is presence. Twelve Black British women and girls, most of whom the theatre world has ignored, are in the National Theatre together and the night belongs to them. I closed the book feeling buzzy rather than settled, which seems right.

A note on facts because friends always ask. Yes, this is the book that shared the 2019 Booker Prize with Margaret Atwood's Testaments. The judges split the award that year, against the rules as they were understood, and people argued about it for months. Whatever you think of prizes, the win put Evaristo on shelves she deserved long before. The edition I read states Black Cat as publisher with a 2019 date and runs to 464 pages, ISBN 9780802156983 if you are ordering it. At that length it sounds heavy, but the broken lines make it move fast. I read it in four sittings. Most of those sittings ran longer than I planned because one more voice turned into three more voices.

Would I press it on everyone. Almost. If you want deep time with two or three people and a tight plot that clicks shut, you may find this diffuse. The style that feels freeing to me, all lower case starts and drifting line breaks, may tire you if you like firm stops. Some portraits, Winsome and Morgan especially for me, feel brief enough to leave a small ache. But if you want to spend a week inside many lives that link and clash and echo, and to come out thinking about mothers and daughters and friends and lovers and work and faith and farms and cities, pick it up. I finished mine on that rainy night feeling like I had been out. I texted a friend about Amma at midnight. She texted back about Bummi. We were both right.