About

FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER

LONGLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION 2009 WINNER OF THE ORANGE YOUTH PANEL AWARD 2009 FINALIST FOR THE HURSTON WRIGHT LEGACY AWARD 2010

'A phenomenal book. It is so ingenious and so novel. Think The Handmaid's Tale meets Noughts and Crosses with a bit of Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll thrown in. This should be thought of as a feminist classic.' Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast

Welcome to a world turned upside down. One minute, Doris, from England, is playing hide-and-seek with her sisters in the fields behind their cottage. The next, someone puts a bag over her head and she ends up in the hold of a slave-ship sailing to the New World . . .

In this fantastically imaginative inversion of the transatlantic slave trade - in which 'whytes' are enslaved by black people - Bernardine Evaristo has created a thought-provoking satire that is as accessible and readable as it is intelligent and insightful. Blonde Roots brings the shackles and cries of long-ago barbarity uncomfortably close and raises timely questions about the society of today.

'A bold and brilliant game of counterfactual history. Evaristo keep[s] her wit and anger at a spicy simmer throughout' Daily Telegraph

'So human and real. Re-imagines past and present with refreshing humour and intelligence' Guardian

'A brilliant satire whose flashes of comedy make the underlying tragedy all the more poignant' Scotland on Sunday

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. British novelist Evaristo delivers an astonishing, uncomfortable and beautiful alternative history that goes back several centuries to flip the slave trade, with Aphrikans enslaving the people of Europa and exporting many of them to Amarika. The plot revolves around Doris, the daughter of a long line of proud cabbage farmers who live in serfdom. After she's kidnapped by slavers, she experiences the horror and inhumanity of slave transport, is sold and works her way back to freedom. The narrative cuts back and forth through time, contrasting the journey to freedom with the journey toward slavery. In a less skilled writer's hands, the premise easily could have worn itself out by the second chapter, but Evaristo's intellectually rigorous narrative constantly surprises, and, for all the barbarism on display, it's strikingly human. Evaristo's novel is a powerful, thoughtful reminder that diabolical behavior can take place in any culture, safety is an illusion and freedom is something easily taken for granted. This difficult and provocative book is a conversation sparker. (Jan.)

From Booklist

As a young girl, Doris is captured by slavers, taken from her family’s poor cabbage farm to the New World to work on the plantation of wealthy Africans. Evaristo, daughter of an English mother and Nigerian father, not only turns the history of African slavery on its head, she mixes times and places: waistcoats and hooped skirts along with modern slang and subways trains on the Underground Railroad. Doris is given the slave name Omorenomwara but holds onto memories of her family and a life of freedom, though lived in poverty. Doris works for a while in the Big House and later, after a failed escape attempt, as a field slave. In first-person accounts, Doris and Captain Katamba, an African slave ship captain, offer their perspectives on the hated trade in human flesh. Acclaimed British author Evaristo captures and reverses the social dynamics that cause people to adapt and to protect their culture under the oppressive and dehumanizing conditions of slavery. --Vanessa Bush

About The Author

Bernardine Evaristo is the Anglo-Nigerian award-winning author of several books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora: past, present, real, imagined. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker Prize in 2019. Her writing also spans short fiction, reviews, essays, drama and writing for BBC radio. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University, London, and Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. She was made an MBE in 2009. As a literary activist for inclusion Bernardine has founded a number of successful initiatives, including Spread the Word writer development agency (1995-ongoing); the Complete Works mentoring scheme for poets of colour (2007-2017) and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize (2012-ongoing).