Blonde Roots: From the Booker prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other

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Romanzo ucronico nel quale l’autrice immagina “cosa sarebbe accaduto se…” lo schiavismo fosse stato perpetrato dagli Africani nei confronti degli Europei, o meglio, come scrive lei, dai Nehri verso i Bianki. But at times it feels that Evaristo is so intent on establishing the details of her alternative world that the emotional reality takes a while to catch up.

This is Evaristo’s first novel entirely in prose - her background is as a poet and her first three books were all partly in verse - but her language retains its musicality and exuberance, particularly in Doris’s un-self-pitying, drily comic tone.

As always, the values of the dominant culture reflect its power structure; the black master's body and attitudes are the desired norm, even the ideal. When Evaristo sticks to these aspects of her story, I think it works amazingly well; however, she makes some odd auxiliary choices. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. This book was written in 2008 and it preceded the much acclaimed Washington Black by Esi Edugan and The Underground Railroad by Colston Whitehead. Evaristo is a poet and the novel is full of playful anachronisms, many of them based around language and emotions that sound decidedly 20th century. This time, although she's writing in the colloquial speech of her narrator, she's still extremely attentive to the function of language, the power of words to shape reality.The reunion of Doris and Sharon is somewhat unlikely, and for literary purposes, fortuitous, enabling the novel to end with a convenient resolution of various loose ends. The reader here is drawn into stories that are shameful by Evaristo’s clever inversion of master and slave(ry). Evaristo has written an "astonishing," "clever," and "beautiful" novel about an alternative history scenario to the slave trade.

Loads of detail is thrown at the reader from the start, much of which is contrary to our history books. Does the glorious sunset diminish the horror, or does the disconnect with the drowning slaves make the horror more real? It’s so different to Girl, Woman, Other, and my regard for Bernadine Evaristo is heightened by having read such different books. And in the end, after the horrors, injustices and continuing agonies caused by slavery, that is probably the only answer we can have. La conformazione del cranio negroide ha dunque prodotto i seguenti tratti: ambizione, motivazione personale, ingegnosità, autodisciplina, coraggio, integrità morale, illuminazione spirituale e responsabilità collettiva.

Blonde Roots turns the whole world on its nappy head, and you'll be surprised how different it looks -- and how similar.