-
Orange Prize for Fiction 2009
longlist
photo © Katie Vandyck
-
Blonde Roots
Bernardine Evaristo
read
an interview with Bernardine Evaristoreviews of Blonde Roots
(links open in a new window)
synopsisWelcome to a world turned upside down. Welcome to the word of Doris. One minute she’s 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 stinking hold of a slave ship sailing to the New World.
When she eventually arrives on a strange tropical island, Doris discovers 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. Things don’t get any better when she becomes personal assistant to the formidable Bwana, a.k.a. Chief Kaga Konata Katumba I, or when she experiences the horrors of life in the sugarcane fields, where slaves are worked to death under the blazing sun. And all the while she dreams of escape, of finding those she has loved and lost, and returning home to her motherland, England…
Bernardine Evaristois the author of the novels-in-verse Lara, and The Emperor’s Babe and the novel with verse Soul Tourists. She co-edited the Granta/British Council annual anthology NW15 (New Writing 15) with the novelist Maggie Gee. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and the Royal Society of Literature, and has written for radio and theatre.
