Girl, Woman, Other

You might, on first glance, find Evaristo's prize winner daunting: the stories of twelve characters, told over 450 pages in a style that, with its idiosyncratic layout and mid-sentence line breaks, looks almost like free verse. It turns out to be anything but: the writing itself is almost breezily straightforward and the characters so lively and distinctive that by the end you feel as if they are friends sitting around your living room. The challenge comes instead from the sheer accumulation of lives and identities: if "identity" is one of the central themes of our time, these twelve people, all by some definition Black and British and nearly all women, explode identity by their sheer variety and individuality, never unaware of their identities and never anything but individual within them. Imagine Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, with its collection of masterfully compressed and connected life stories, but stretched not across history but contemporary Britain. I expect Girl, Women, Other will evoke the same level of interest and discussion.