An audio book, and a Booker Prize winner.
Amma, a black lesbian playright (over 50) is having a debut at the National Theatre. We learn about her past (a squat called Freedonia, 100+ lovers). When her parents died she wanted a daughter and knew a likely sperm donor. We move to her daughter Yaz's PoV. Yaz is in the audience. Her gay father's now a prof, sometimes on TV. We then learn about Dominique, who could have been Amma's long-term lover but who went to the States with a woman who turned out to be violent.
Attention then switches to Carol, of Nigerian parents. When she was gang-raped at 13, she lost her way at school. She turned to a teacher, Mrs King, for help. It worked. Carol did maths at Oxford then got a City job and married a white. Her father had a Ph.D and died young. Her mother had a 1st in maths and ended up running a cleaning company. We follow the mother's PoV for a while.
We switch to Lititia, a classmate of Carol, who left school with nothing, and is single with 3 kids. She's working hard to better herself, looking for love.
Shirley began as an ambitious young teacher, but the school went downhill (metal detectors at the entrance) and she became an "old dragon". She's married to a handsome lawyer, Lennox. He takes the kids off her hands for the odd weekend, going to the seaside. Shirley's mum went too.
Winsom retired/returned to the Carribean with her husband after being a bus conductor for years. She's Shirley's mother. Shirley and family spend long holidays there. Shirley's disappointed that Carol never came back to say thanks. When Winsom was nearly 50, Shirley's husband (who Winsom sees as a better version of her own husband) initiates an affair with her which lasts a year - the most unlikely-sounding event in the book.
When Penelope was 16, her parents told her that she wasn't their daughter. She marries Giles who's quite a catch. They have kids but he doesn't let him work. She remarries, to a psychologist this time., but after a while that fails too. She has a cleaner from an earlier chapter. She teaches with teachers from earlier chapters.
We meet Megan. At school the way she dresses makes schoolmates think she's a lesbian. At 16 she drops out, hangs out with druggies and the homeless. She leaves home at 18, discovers chatrooms. In a section of the book that's most like a lecture, we learn about gender theory. She relates to Bibbi, discussing pronouns, and whether surgery is always necessary. They meet and get on well, become gender-free with a million followers on Twitter. They talk at Yaz's school, get free tickets to Amma's play, "The Last Amazon of Dahomie".
Hatti is 93, back on her UK farm which she's given up running. Her (mixed race?) mother was orphaned at 8, propositioned by a farmer while she was a shop-assistant (unlikely?)
At the afterparty, various strands connect. Amma's friends and family are there. Carol, high up in banking, thanks Shirley, who is tearful.
At the end Penelope is on her way to meet Hatti at her farm because she's discovered, thanks to a chance DNA test, that she's Hatti's daughter.
There are many examples of racism (especially in South-west England), sexism etc., though the women split into factions too - their bad behaviour is often described by the woman characters as "acting just like a man". Times are changing - Yaz finds her mother's feminism old-fashioned. Is she "part of the problem"? Motherhood is a recurring topic - how it affects careers, how childcare is managed (grandmothers? a squad of godmothers). How much should one complain formally about racism? How should non-white boys deal with repeated frisking by police? The issue of integration or gaining strength through isolation applies to issues of race, gender, class, etc. Women experiment with other women, sometimes for the unpressurized company. Older people are more understanding of sexual flexibility - they've often known of women living as a couple.
Interesting details, and listenable. It was only when I read the reviews that I realised about the punctuation.
Other reviews
- Micha Frazer-Carroll
- Will Gompertz (The structure is simple: there are a dozen separate character portraits divided equally into four chapters. ... 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 cracks appear about two-thirds through the novel, when it becomes apparent that the sum is never going to be greater than the parts. This was the point at which the narrative needed to develop and deepen - to flesh out what has gone before, to draw the reader into the world the characters inhabit. But instead of building the story and developing the protagonists and their relationships, we are given yet another batch of brief biographies ... The lively introductory profiles - the getting-to-know-yous - fail to evolve into complex character studies, the net effect of which is a growing sense of superficiality. 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.)
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