Bernardine Evaristo, _Girl, Woman, Other_

 BOOKER PRIZE WINNER for 2019, and a better than average Booker winner, I'd say. 

At the novel's hub is radical lesbian experimental playwright Amma, whose new play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey,  is having its premier at the National Theater--she is hitting the big time, in other words. The first section is from her point of view, filling us in on her story and sensibility.

The next eleven sections are the spokes, we might say. Many are from the point of view of other people present at the premier--Amma's daughter, an old lover, an old playmate. But we also get a few sections from people connected to the people connected to Amma...maybe more a network than a wheel, then.

What the characters all have in common is not only that they have a (sometimes mediated) tie to Amma, though.  They are also all women (though one is moving towards non-binary) of African heritage (some having come from Africa itself, some the children of immigrants, some the descendants of people abducted from Africa many generations ago). Even more intriguingly, they all also have in common a kind of free-verse style of presentation that Evaristo came up with for the novel. A random sample:

     by the time Carole began her banking career in the City, Bummi had a staff of ten

     one of them, Sister Omofe from church, was the most pleasant and diligent worker of them all

     her husband, Jimoh, had taken a second wife back in Port Harcourt where he ran his mobile phone business and left her to raise their two sons, Tayo and Wole, alone

Have to admit, I was skeptical at first--is this actually going to work over the course of a 450-page novel? But the free-verse method actually gave the book a headlong momentum. I found it very hard to stop in the middle of any character's section, absorbed not just by the conjuring up of the section's character (all in free  indirect discourse) but by the style's pace, the march of the statements, continuously unscrolling without affording any natural place to pause.

Since the characters shared this discourse as well as their connections to femaleness and Africa, they always seemed to belong in the same book together, even though they are also widely different--of different generations, different politics, different levels of education, different classes, different sensibilities. Together they constitute a cosmos, and by the the time we get to the  final chapter, "The After-party," we have traveled far together. 

And then, a neat little curveball in the epilogue. Or perhaps we should call it a googly.