Co-winner of the Booker Prize in 2019, Evaristo's brave and powerful novel focuses on the intertwining lives of a twelve different women. It does this via a structure that eschews full stops, conveying fluctuating ideas through a series of paragraphs often resembling the rhythms of free-form verse while capturing the characters' impressions and ideas.
While it carries off this stylistic approach beautifully, perhaps the novel's most notable achievement is its focus on the way its characters work through their problems, making mistakes along the way, encountering prejudice yet finding that the answers they seek to it often lead down other dark pathways. There is no easy solace for these characters in some abstract notion of 'sisterhood', as demonstrated most powerfully by the story of Dominique, whose escape from male oppression is to find herself with the dominant, bullying Nzinga, an experience which, perhaps, she never entirely recovers from.
Freedom, instead, consists of throwing off a whole range of restrictions imposed by others, and that includes those who dangle ladders promising escape that just leads to the embracing of someone else's values which may indeed be better but are equally alienating if they are not your own.
It's a tremendously powerful intellectual piece of work. ranking alongside Doris Lesson's The Golden Notebook: texts that occupy a feminist idiom, certainly, but are never constrained by it, throwing up far more important questions than they do easy answers.
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