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

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As it’s alternative history, I tried hard to overlook this, but I failed because I wasn’t enjoying it.

The England of Doris’s childhood is medieval and feudal, but Great Ambossa, the small but wealthy island off the main continent of Aphrika, with its capital of Londolo, shares features of our age with aspects of a futuristic dystopia.

Her eighth book will be a collection of her short stories, published by in Italian by Carocci in 2015. The second section is Chief Kaga Konata Katamba’s tracts, describing how he became wealthy trading slaves, and justifying the trade. There is a map at the front of the book that shows Aphrika as north of the equator and Europa to the south; essentially, the African and European continents are swapped for this story.

Parties of blak tourists take trips into the whyte ghettos to marvel at the poverty as tourists do now to the townships of South Africa; the Ambossan working classes shout abuse at the few free whytes who live in the suburbs - ‘Wigger, go home! Rather, she implies, it was merely an accident of history, geography and opportunity that whites enslaved blacks.The book divides into three parts, the first and third narrated by Doris, the middle by her slave master, Chief Kaga Konata Katamba I (whose slaves are branded with his initials), who talks like an old Etonian. Die Autorin schafft einen berührenden, lustigen, schockierenden, zum Nachdenken anregenden Roman, der aufzeigt, was für willkürliche Konstrukte schwarz und weiß, oben und unten, Norden und Süden, falsch und richtig eigentlich sind. The fashions of the Europeans are from hundreds of years ago, yet Doris says that her physique, stick skinny so her bones show, is the height of beauty. This ingenious bit of "what-if" speculation provides the backdrop for a thrilling adventure about a "whyte" woman named Doris Scagglethorpe who works as a "house wigger" for Chief Kaga Konata Katamba.

Like countless millions, she was separated from family, then mercilessly driven, exploited, beaten and humiliated.In the reverse-image past that Evaristo imagines, civilized Africans have built a vibrant culture and economy by capturing primitive Europeans and using them as slaves.

which is motivated by the absurdity, as he sees it, of the `pagan' beliefs about a saviour on a cross and their appalling treatment of `witches'. I was attracted to this particular book by it's premise which was, of course, also at the core of the wonderful Malorie Blackman books. Anzi, mentre il Negro appartiene alla «Specie Umana», il Mongolo e il Caucaside rientrano in una definizione più ampia di «Genere Umano», che va dalla «Specie Umana» pienamente evoluta a specie meno evolute classificate come «Neo-Primati».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 . Along with the beasts of burden who work the fields, the Caucasoi is incapable of acute emotionality because, due to its Neo-Primate state, it is but a few steps up from the animal kingdom with its primary preoccupations of Perambulate, Agitate, Capitulate, Somnambulate, Ejaculate, Procreate, Masticate, Procrastinate and Hibernate. 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. The slave raiders, it seemed, were in cahoots with aristocrats like Percy and the middlemen who supplied them with slaves for shipment overseas. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other made her the first black woman to win the Booker Prize in 2019, as well winning the Fiction Book of the Year Award at the British Book Awards in 2020, where she also won Author of the Year, and the Indie Book Award.