Book Club Guide

Girl, Woman, Other

by Bernardine Evaristo · 2019 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Black British womanhood in its multiplicity — no single story
The connections between lives that seem separate
History as something that reaches into the present — and the women who make it

About this book

Twelve interlinked lives, mostly Black British women, across a century; vivid, polyphonic and joyful.

Published in 2019, Girl, Woman, Other was joint Booker Prize winner with Margaret Atwood. Evaristo was the first Black British woman to win the Booker Prize.

Discussion questions

The novel follows twelve characters whose lives are loosely connected. How does Evaristo create a sense of a whole from these fragments — and what does the fragmentary form say about the impossibility of a single Black British story?
The prose runs without conventional punctuation or line breaks. What does this style achieve — and how does it relate to the novel's interest in voice and multiplicity?
The characters range in age from their twenties to their nineties, covering most of the 20th century and into the 21st. What does this temporal range add to the novel's argument?
The final chapter — a family reunion — resolves some of the book's mysteries. How does Evaristo handle this convergence — as satisfying or as deliberately incomplete?
Evaristo won the Booker Prize in 2019, jointly with Margaret Atwood. What does the novel do that earns its place alongside Atwood's The Testaments — and what does it do that no Atwood novel could?