Bernardine Evaristo’s eighth book Girl, Woman, Other brims with vitality ... Evaristo writes sensitively about how we raise children, how we pursue careers, how we grieve and how we love ... Previously, Evaristo has written verse novels, prose novels and drama among other types of literature, and the form she chooses here is breezily dismissive of convention. The flow of this prose-poetry hybrid feels absolutely right, with the pace and layout of words matched to the lilt and intonation of the characters’ voices ... Evaristo celebrates the mix of African and British in all of our DNA; moreover she captures the shared experiences that make us, as she puts it in her dedication, 'members of the human family.'

... a big, busy novel with a large root system ... Lorrie Moore has written that Ann Beattie’s fiction is a valentine to friendships. The same is true of Evaristo’s. This novel is a densely populated village where everyone leans on one another in order to scrape by ... presents a landscape of abiding multicultural sensitivity ... Evaristo has a gift for appraising the lives of her characters with sympathy and grace while gently skewering some of their pretensions. When you are feeling your way into new ways of living, she understands, there must be room for error ... written in a hybrid form that falls somewhere between prose and poetry. Evaristo’s lines are long, like Walt Whitman’s or Allen Ginsberg’s, and there are no periods at the ends of them ... There’s a looseness to her tone that gives this novel its buoyancy. Evaristo’s wit helps, too ... This looseness can detract as well. There is sometimes the sense that Evaristo loves all of her sentences a little bit but few of them quite enough. This essentially plotless novel grows longer, but it does not always appear to grow richer ... There comes a point in this narrative where you’d rather settle into the characters you’ve met than be introduced to still more new ones. You begin to feel you are always between terminals at a very large airport, your clothes and toiletries in a little wheelie suitcase behind you. It’s possible to admire this deeply humane novel while permitting your enthusiasm to remain under control.

...a triumphantly wide-ranging novel, told in a hybrid of prose and poetry, about the struggles, longings, conflicts and betrayals of 12 (mostly) black women and one non-binary character. It’s also, to my mind, the strongest contender on the [Booker shortlist], a big, bold, sexy book that cracks open a world that needs to be known ... There’s a freewheeling, exploratory feel to the novel ... At times, these fragmented paragraphs read like poetry, at other times like a Whatsapp conversation. All of this could have been schematic, preachy, and the prose can become weighed down by political correctness. But humour always undercuts the woke messages. All the women are morally compromised, most have screwed up somewhere down the line. Evaristo’s job is to observe, to broaden our minds and to be funny — often very funny indeed — about their hypocrisies.

Evaristo has written a formally slippery book. I suppose you must call it verse instead of prose. Line breaks supplant punctuation, so phrases pile up rather than congealing into paragraphs. Occasionally, they function more as we see them do in poetry, bringing the reader’s attention to a word or a phrase or an idea ... I was skeptical at first; the approach seemed like a gimmick that would inevitably feel tiresome. I soon stopped noticing the conceit. Despite appearances, the author is writing prose more than anything else, and the book taught me—quite quickly—how to read it. The lines flow into one another, creating a sense of urgency ... Each of [the] characters...feels specific, and vibrant, and not quite complete, insofar as the best fictional characters remain as elusive and surprising as real people are. This is a feat; the whole book is. If, ultimately, Girl, Woman, Other is a little too long, I still never tired of its voice. Evaristo is a gifted portraitist, and you marvel at both the people she conjures and the unexpected way she reveals them to you.

... [Evaristo] is an astonishingly creative, insightful and humane writer ... Girl, Woman, Other is a breathtaking symphony of black women’s voices, a clear-eyed survey of contemporary challenges that’s nevertheless wonderfully life-affirming ... choreographed with such fluid artistry that it never feels labored ... There’s nothing forced about the virtual exclusion of white characters from this novel; they have simply been shifted to the periphery, relegated to the blurry sidelines where black characters reside in so much literary fiction written by white authors ... The complex movements of this large group could easily have overwhelmed all but the chess masters among us, but Evaristo doesn’t shove us into the whole crowd at once. Instead, we meet these women in a series of elegantly layered stories ... Together, all these women present a cross-section of Britain that feels godlike in its scope and insight ... With the passage from gentle empathy to steely realism to wry satire, one marvels at the dimensions of Evaristo’s tonal range ... a novel so modern in its vision, so confident in its insight that it seems to grasp the full spectrum of racism that black women confront, while also interrogating black women’s response to it ... But just as crucial to this novel’s triumph is Evaristo’s proprietary style, a long-breath, free-verse structure that sends her phrases cascading down the page. She’s formulated a literary mode somewhere between prose and poetry that enhances the rhythms of speech and narrative. It’s that rare experimental technique that sounds like a sophisticated affectation but in her hands feels instantly accommodating, entirely natural. It’s just the style needed to carry along all these women’s stories and then bring them to a perfectly calibrated moment of harmony — a grace note that rings out after the orchestral grandness of Girl, Woman, Other draws to a perfect close.

Evaristo’s facility with verse fiction is such that the text moves in utter harmony, without disruption. The novel flows seamlessly, like water, from through to thought, character to character ... The relatively brief sections given to each character allow the novel to maintain its flow without a core central plot. It remains, through each person’s eyes, eminently readable and emotionally intense ... Evaristo’s is smarter, more complex, more engaged and engaging [than Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, with which it shared the 2019 Man Booker Prize] .

Black women’s stories have long been misread as something they are not. It is hard to write fiction without being asked: is this story about you? And does this singular tale represent the collective black female experience? Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other turns a subtle side-eye to both questions, and makes answering them an impossible task ... Feminists have always grappled with certain problems, such as commercialisation...Evaristo weaves these struggles into dialogue without reducing her speakers into mouthpieces for a popular debate. Some of her conversations feel naive...but they are nonetheless conversations that many of us have had. Others are contentious...but they’re tackled sensitively ... Each storyline brings the reader round to a position of empathy ... When each section ends, we leave with a new perspective ... there is something unconditional about the relationships here – the protagonists support each other, and are often forgiving and gentle ... Girl, Woman, Other is about struggle, but it is also about love, joy and imagination ... Evaristo’s world is not idealised, but there is something uniquely beautiful about it ... For many readers, it’s not a familiar world – this is a Britain less often depicted in fiction. But that certainly doesn’t mean it’s not a world that is possible, and worth celebrating.

... an astonishingly vibrant, layered narrative ... the most distinctive novel of the year ... is its own testament to the resplendent lives of 12 resilient women in a very modern Britain ... a structure that pulls the reader in immediately, seizing both the intellect and the emotions as the narrative unfolds. It is like reading Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and James Joyce simultaneously ... Superlatives pale in the shadow of the monumental achievement of Girl, Woman, Other. Few adjectives suffice. It’s hard not to overpraise this brilliant novel. Evaristo’s verbal acrobatics do things language shouldn’t be able to do. It’s a Cirque du Soleil of fiction ... Readers should put down whatever book they’re reading and immerse themselves in this one. Bernardine Evaristo is the writer of the year. Girl, Woman, Other is the book of the decade.

... courageous and intersectional ... Evaristo uses minimal punctuation and fluid paragraphs for a high-velocity style of exposition. And, oh, what is exposed. Hearing from mothers and their children, teachers and their students across generations, readers might expect that they’ll get to see just what these characters can’t know about one another, but they won’t imagine the dazzling specificities nor the unspooling dramas; they will be entertained, educated, and riveted.

... exuberant, capacious, and engaging ... Is it perfect? No. But few novels are, even Booker winners. Is it complex, astute, painful, funny, enlightening, and most of all enjoyable? No question ... an elegant and compulsively readable account of the black women of England ... one of the many achievements of Girl, Woman, Other is how its story lines at once stand alone and layer together. Plumbing the many dimensions of her character’s lives, Evaristo revels in universals and singularities alike ... As a novelist, Evaristo is firmly in control of the waves she rides. When her characters skirt the edge of stereotype, she holds them back or gleefully pushes them in ... I laughed, I cried, I turned the last page fully satisfied.

As the novel progresses in clever twists and turns, the characters’ lives intersect, culminating in a surprise ending. Their moving tales of pain, joy and friendship are drawn from a wide range of backgrounds and heritages: African, Caribbean, European. This is a story for our times. The language of Girl, Woman, Other is exuberant, bursting at the seams in delightful ways ... this is a book that begs to be read out loud ... Evaristo is adept at writing humor ... From witty summations to situational comedy, Evaristo has a knack for sending up contemporary society ... Many of the protagonists in the book have suffered from sexual harassment and abuse, but none remains a victim. All are, in their own way, triumphant, feisty, even warrior-like ... In Evaristo’s eighth book she continues to expand and enhance our literary canon. If you want to understand modern day Britain, this is the writer to read.

Bernardine Evaristo’s eighth work of fiction...is one of those books that makes the reader ask 'Where have you been all my life?' and rush out for the author’s backlist ... The counterpoint between different characters’ accounts of the same experiences is one of the satisfying pleasures of the book ... Evaristo....welcomes the reader and provides strong stories, appealing characters and lots of humour. But she is also an iconoclast, challenging our comfortable preconceptions on race and politics, and doing it in a narratively innovative way ... [a] warm, seductive and politically engaged book.

[A] rambunctious and hydra-headed creation ... I was at once won over by its fast and loose way with the English sentence, quasi-colloquial, with minimal punctuation and capitalization, sometimes breaking down into short stacks of single lines. Yet it doesn’t take an aesthete to find the prose accessible. Anyone can appreciate Evaristo’s sensitivity to the passions in her people ... Overall this novel asserts a classic mastery, equal to the best of Zadie Smith and Elena Ferrante, authors themselves out of pariah groups and difficult upbringings. I daresay such artists are creating, in rare new colors, the great social canvas of the century’s first half.

...[a] vigorous, polyphonic, Booker-shortlisted novel, which devotes a chapter each to 12 characters, mostly black women. It provides a reframed picture of Britain across the decades from a mixed-race orphan at the turn of the previous century to the gender-neutral Megan/Morgan, a social-media influencer ... If this sounds like some sort of 'woke' nightmare, Evaristo’s skill lies in making this more than a worthy exercise in tick-box inclusiveness ... Her writing, as in previous books, is free-flowing, eschewing normal sentence structure and sometimes slipping closer to poetry, catching the cadences of the characters’ voices and the force of their emotions ... Here, the women, with all their flaws, mistakes and desires on show, bite back, with wit, force, fierceness and wisdom.

... has 'readability' ... The portraits are well-drawn if a little sketchy ... Bernadine Evaristo is a good writer. She's funny, precise and confident. Her characters have plenty to say, most of it worth listening to, some of it enlightening ... Full stops are abandoned in preference for a poetic style of punctuation with line breaks used to control rhythm and beat...the technique works a treat with prose flowing and sparkling like the prosecco at Amma's after-party ... The collage of well-composed individual stories the author has constructed into a single, albeit fragmented novel, succeeds in depicting a rich and textured account of life in Britain as seen and experienced by her cast of characters. It is very nearly a great book, but not quite. The cracks appear about two-thirds through the novel, when it becomes apparent that the sum is never going to be greater than the parts...instead of building the story and developing the protagonists and their relationships, we are given yet another batch of brief biographies, all of which are fine in isolation - some excellent, actually - but they are too much in the context of the whole ... becomes a bit monotonous, a tad formulaic; a little predictable ... Evaristo does attempt to add drama and three-dimensionality by way of chapter-connecting plot devices, but the set-ups are too obvious and the pay-offs routine ... leaves you frustrated - too many delicious starters without a truly satisfying main course. In fact, it is doubly frustrating, because this is a book with so much going for it: compelling characters discussing important subjects with intelligence and verve. It is disappointing to be denied the chance to get to know some of them better ... a strikingly contemporary novel that has plenty to say (it very occasionally spills over into lecturing), and does so with some of the finest writing I've read in a long time.

In place of the formal unity and single protagonists of previous Evaristo novels...this is a whole world, full of variety and contradiction, details that lead nowhere, private tragedies and public unfairnesses that no one is able to redress ... the closer you look the more organized the novel starts to appear. Motifs repeat themselves ... Girl, Woman, Other celebrates the spectrum of black British identity, but it’s full of characters who don’t or can’t, or who see the world as more complicated than that. It’s a novel shaped by intersectionality—12 narratives, each bringing together multiple strands of identity, each informed by multiple social contingencies—but this form is what keeps it in pieces, a complex collection of fragments that aren’t meant to speak as one. What connects them is Evaristo’s insistence on names ... There are, intentionally, too many names, and they make up a fictional world in which—like the real one—you can’t assume everyone is like you, or wants the things you want.

In surveying Britain’s social history over more than a century through the interconnected lives of 12 characters, all of them black women (save for two exceptions), Bernardine Evaristo has set an ambitious agenda for herself. Both in substance and style, her vibrant novel Girl, Woman, Other achieves that goal with a striking gallery of the lives and loves, triumphs and heartbreaks of these dozen memorable human beings and the world they inhabit ... Evaristo never stumbles in her ability to portray these figures with empathy, honesty and, at times, sharp humor. In every case, she skillfully reveals their struggles to define what it means to live meaningfully as spouses, lovers, friends and simply good people ... One of the principal pleasures of Girl, Woman, Other is Evaristo’s energetic, at times playful style. Hers is a unique sort of prose that nods in the direction of poetry in both format and occasionally in content. She dispenses with the use of some conventions of punctuation without ever sacrificing readability. This exciting, often unsettling novel succeeds by respecting both the dignity of its subjects and the intelligence of its readers.

... high-end chick lit. This isn’t an insult to Evaristo’s novel — to me, chick lit comprises heroine-centered narratives that focus on the trials and tribulations of their protagonists, appealing mainly to women readers ... But wait. How can a book that is written in a hybrid of poetry and prose fit into a popular-fiction category? Though Evaristo uses nonstandard punctuation and capitalization, her language is airy, straightforward and completely digestible on one reading ... clever, breezy and fun ... includes harrowing elements such as a gang rape and an infant ripped away from its mother — though it felt like these were passed over rather quickly. Fewer characters might have been a good idea, but Evaristo is determined not to leave anyone or anything out ... Bernardine Evaristo is here to turn on the lights, give you your money’s worth, and let you decide for yourself.

... deserves every accolade, and more ... a creative and technical marvel ... a book so bursting with wit, empathy, and insight, it can rarely pause to take a breath, let alone break a paragraph (or at least put a full stop at the end of one) ... indelible characters, all plugged into Evaristo’s ever-expanding web, come and go within Girl‘s pages, each one immediately, recognizably human but still somehow far from archetype. Maybe the book’s most ingenious trick, though, is that its reflections on race and feminism hardly ever feel like polemics; there’s just too much pure vivid life on every page.

How did the Booker end up such a muddle? Perhaps partly because it was so overtly, this year, a prize devoted to celebrating diversity above other forms of excellence in fiction ... If diversity is what you value most in new fiction — and given that one of the great purposes of fiction is to help us understand the experiences of others, it might very well be — then it seems almost indecent to prize one form of diversity more than another. So that would make it difficult to choose a single winner wouldn’t it? Unless perhaps it is possible to decide which novel is, as it might be almost quantitatively, the most diverse? That novel this year is Girl, Woman, Other ... highly readable, even slightly saga-ish ... Despite the lack of conventional punctuation Girl, Woman, Other makes for fast, easy reading, but it never deepens much as a novel beyond this level of quasi-sociological reportage, skimming along.

The party Evaristo’s throwing is massive, and as a good host, she’s intent on making introductions ... Voices change chapter by chapter, all conveyed in something looser than either verse or standard prose. (Line breaks stand in for periods and capitalization is sparse, but ultimately the language feels no more experimental or less natural than, say, Homer.) Evaristo sidles up to her characters in the quiet moments of their lives...and lets their thoughts and histories unspool just long enough to convey who they are and how they got that way. In some chapters Evaristo’s approach can verge on caricature, in the boardwalk-artist sense: an exaggeration of traits that makes the subject more, not less, individual ... Part of Evaristo’s skill in convincing us we know her characters can be chalked up to her research skills, honed through previous historical novels. She populates every corner of Girl, Woman, Other with lively details collected from everywhere ... Certainly, Evaristo can poke fun at her characters. But one always senses it’s done with love. Bearing more than 450 pages, action ranging from 1895 to the present day across three continents, and an empathy deep as history, Girl, Woman, Other is a generous book in every sense.

A magnificent chorus of black British voices ... These stylistic choices are, at first, disorienting—and that makes perfect thematic sense ... Instead of forcing her creations to code-switch to make their lives comfortable for general consumption, Evaristo compels the reader to accommodate and adjust. The rewards for this tiny bit of mental labor are extraordinary. There is no overarching story, but the lives of these women and one 'gender-free' character intersect in revelatory ways ... s she creates a space for immigrants and the children of immigrants to tell their stories, Evaristo explores a range of topics both contemporary and timeless. There is room for everyone to find a home in this extraordinary novel ... Beautiful and necessary.

Evaristo beguiles with her exceptional depictions of a range of experiences of black British women ... Evaristo’s fresh, clipped style adds urgency riddled with sparks of humor. This is a stunning powerhouse of vibrant characters and heartbreaks.