Blonde Roots

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

RECIPIENT OF THE WOMEN’S PRIZE OUTSTANDING CONTRIBUTION AWARD

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMENS 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 Handmaids 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. Womens 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 throughoutDaily Telegraph

So human and real. Re-imagines past and present with refreshing humour and intelligenceGuardian

A brilliant satire whose flashes of comedy make the underlying tragedy all the more poignantScotland on Sunday