She is Reader in Creative Writing at Brunel University and designed and teaches the anuual six month Guardian¬-University of East Anglia 'How to Tell a Story' fiction course in London. My book club had chosen this book as our latest read so, as I had already read this just a few months ago, I decided to try another of her novels. For me there was a fairly equal balance between these two feelings, a three star rating for a book that felt at various times a two star read as well as a four. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University, London, and Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature.

She has imagined the world with linguistic flourishes, creating a tale that is satirical as well as moving. Her books range in genre from poetry, verse-novels, a novel-with-verse, a novella, short stories, prose novels, radio and theatre drama, and literary essays and criticism. For actually the cross, in all its despair, cruelty and absurdity, is the real answer to power that controls, manipulates and oppresses. Since racist prejudice lay at the heart of the trade, indigenous social strata were no ultimate protection against capture.She makes an escape again, is recaptured, severely beaten and sent to do manual work in a sugar cane plantation. Evaristo χρησιμοποιεί σημαντικά στοιχεία από τη ζωή και τα δεινά των σκλάβων, ώστε να τραβήξει την προσοχή του αναγνώστη και να του θυμίσει, αν τυχόν το ξέχασε, ότι σκοπός της δεν είναι να βγάλει το άχτι της στους λευκούς για όσα πέρασαν και συνεχίζουν να περνούν οι έγχρωμοι, αλλά ότι δεν πρέπει να ξεχνάμε τι έχουμε κάνει, μπας και καταλάβουμε ότι πρέπει όλο αυτό επιτέλους να τελειώσει. It looks beautiful at first, but actually shows slavers throwing the dead and dying overboard as a typhoon approaches.

It reads like the kind of fanfic that people label crack because they just want to toss in whatever they think is funny without a care for whether it makes sense to the story. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other made her the first black woman to win the Booker Prize in 2019, as well winning the Fiction Book of the Year Award at the British Book Awards in 2020, where she also won Author of the Year, and the Indie Book Award. Does the glorious sunset diminish the horror, or does the disconnect with the drowning slaves make the horror more real?Then there’s the wordplay: Shepherd's Bush becomes Goatsherd Bush, The Black and White Mistrel Show becomes The Whyte and Blak Minstrel Show, and the West Japanese Islands are misnamed for the same reason as the West Indies were. But now, amid the warm glow of 21st-century liberalism, with our brilliant black president, what could we possibly learn from a new satire of slavery? I did like how she mixed in cultural things that people would be able to identify as from somewhere in Europe or somewhere in Africa, so that when she turned the tables and blaks where those in power and enslaving whytes, it makes many readers really think and become aware of prejudices they may not have consciously thought about before. The whole story is build on the foundation of an alternative world, and Evaristo used so many narrative tricks to make is feel like a real one! Il valore imprescindibile dell’essere al mondo è, oltre alla vita, la libertà senza quale non possiamo dirci degni di essere chiamati umani.

Blonde Roots starts from a thought-provoking hypothesis: “ Imagine Africans the masters and Europeans their slaves“. Various pointers (not least the "what happened next" postscript) suggest the early twentieth century at the latest; the slave ships appear to be sailing boats, and there is no electricity, although there is a disused Londolo Underground. Doris never hints at a rosy-tinted nostalgia for the social structures of home - it had its own injustices aplenty (as her family experienced from being at the bottom of the pile) - and by implication, nor does Evaristo for the tribal structures of historical Africa. There are kidnaps, punishments, escapes, rapes, revenge, appalling living conditions, love, separations, reunions, sacrifice, and more. When she finally arrives on a strange tropical island, Doris discovers that she is, in fact, a pig-ugly savage with a brain the size of a pea, whose only purpose in life is to please her mistress.Think The Handmaid’s Tale meets Noughts and Crosses with a bit of Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll thrown in.

Doris is a feisty and irrepressible character and although often horrific, her story is an engrossing page turner. After giving Doris a proper name -- "Omorenomwara" -- her African owner expects her to look respectable, which means wearing her straight blonde hair in plaited hoops all over her head and going barefoot.She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004 and the Royal Society of Arts in 2006. Ordinarily, I don't worry about the point of a book; most of them are written simply because the author had an idea for a story and they wrote it down. Some said that the guns the greedy aristocrats received in exchange for slaves encouraged them to start more wars just to meet the demand of the slave traders who wanted a yearly increase in exports.