Blonde Roots [Hardcover]

Evaristo remains an undeniably bold and energetic writer, whose world-view is anything but one-dimensional (Sunday Times )

One of Britain's most innovative authors . . . Bernardine Evaristo always dares to be different (New Nation )

`Novelists are irresistably drawn to the `what if' game. But it has seldom been done on the scale of Bernardine Evaristo's astonishing new novel which takes one of the great horrors of history and turns it on its head. ...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. But it's also a satire, almost Swiftian in its imaginative leaps, in which humour and suffering are effortlessly intermingled. ...This brilliant novel will fulfil her purpose of making readers view the transatlantic slave trade with fresh eyes.'

`'Writers messing around with history is nothing new, but the way that Evaristo entirely inverts the story of slavery is mesmerising. She has imagined the world with linguistic flourishes, creating a tale that is satirical as well as moving.'

'I thought this was an absolutely amazing book...a reminder of what great literature is about.'
Dreda Say Mitchell, Critic

`As with a Swiftian satire, Evaristo's novel is powerful not for its fantastical elements but for its ability to bring home the horror of historical events.'

`(Bernardine Evaristo)...has come up with an ingenious way of refreshing the horrors of the slave trade...This is Evaristo's first novel entirely in prose...but her language retains its musicality and exuberance, particularly in Doris's un-self-pitying, drily comic tone...more than just a clever satire on race [it] achieves what one presumes the author intended: to remind us that 'us' and 'them' could so easily have been reversed, and that regarding someone as less than fully human is the root of all tyranny.'

`Evaristo has provided a brilliant satire whose flashes of comedy make the underlying tragedy all the more poignant.'

`Blonde Roots re-imagines past and present with refreshing humour and intelligence....It's the message that freedom is the right to choose your own bonds that makes Blonde Roots so human and real.'

`She has found a way to mix slavery with humour. Her book is funny, and she avoids the fallacious trap of equating suffering with moral superiority. Evaristo has seized a cautious, private thought and expounded with deliberate satire, dry wit and acute insight into this thing we call history...Evaristo has created a rich precedent.'

Welcome to a world turned upside down. One minute, Doris 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.

When she finally arrives on a strange tropical island, Doris discovers that she is, in fact, a pig-ugly savage with a brain the size of a pea, whose only purpose in life is to please her mistress. While experiencing the hardships of life in the sugarcane fields, she dreams of escape, of finding those she has loved and lost, and of returning home to her motherland, England . . .

Bernardine Evaristo is the author of three novels, Lara, The Emperor’s Babe and Soul Tourists, all of which fuse fiction with poetry. Blonde Roots is her first prose novel. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004 and the Royal Society of Arts in 2006. She lives in London.