?Bernardine Evaristo uncovers characters lost to history and myth and with compassion, an original and brilliant voice, and an unparalleled craft--all tinged with humor--she restores them and thus us.”
--Chris Abani, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas

'Evaristo is extremely attentive to the function of language, the power of words to shape reality.'
--Ron Charles, Washington Post Book World

?This riproaring, full-bodied riff on sex, secrecy and family is Bernardine Evaristo’s seventh book. If you don’t yet know her work, you should--she says things about modern Britain that no one else does.”
--Guardian (UK)

?A brilliant study of great characters in modern London. As such--as Mr. Barrington Walker, Esq. himself might have acknowledged--it is very clever indeed.”
--Independent on Sunday (UK)

?Fear and loathing of homosexuals has a long history in the West Indies...Bernardine Evaristo, in her funny, brave new novel, Mr. Loverman...explores issues of homosexuality in the British West Indies and London’s West Indian diaspora community...I loved...this tender, even trailblazing novel.”
--The Spectator (UK)

?Evaristo’s second prose novel similarly transforms our often narrow perceptions of gay men in England. The familiar trope of the closet is deployed, but contested and reworked in winningly credible, moving ways...The effect is variously comical, agonizing and, ultimately, moving. Evaristo tells us of lives we imagined we knew, while rearranging much more than the furniture.”
--Independent (UK)

?Evaristo has a lot going on in this unusual urban romance, but beneath her careful study of race and sexuality is a beautiful love story. Not many writers could have two old men having sexual intercourse in a bedsit to a soundtrack of Shabba Ranks’s ?Mr. Loverman’ and save it from bad taste, much less make it sublime. But the hero of this book, and his canny creator, make everything taste just fine.”
--Telegraph (UK)

'A pacey fable about summoning both the daring and the art to live a truthful life, and her writing simply fizzes with musical energy.'
--Sunday Express (UK)

?This poignant tragi-comedy goes some way toward exploring engrained prejudice.”
--Time Out London (UK)

Barrington Jedidiah Walker is seventy-four and leads a double life. Born and bred in Antigua, he's lived in Hackney, London, for years. A flamboyant character with a fondness for William Shakespeare, Barrington is a husband, father, grandfather?and also secretly gay. With an abundance of laugh-out-loud humor and wit, Mr. Loverman explodes cultural myths and shows the extent of what can happen when people fear the consequences of being true to themselves.

His deeply religious and disappointed wife, Carmel, thinks he sleeps with other women. When their marriage goes into meltdown, Barrington wants to divorce Carmel and live with Morris, but after a lifetime of fear and deception, will he manage to break away? With an abundance of laugh-out-loud humor and wit, Mr. Loverman explodes cultural myths and shows the extent of what can happen when people fear the consequences of being true to themselves.

The most provocative debut novel of the year, 'a dizzying satire' (The New Yorker) that 'boldly turns history on its head' (Elle).

What if the history of the transatlantic slave trade had been reversed and Africans had enslaved Europeans? How would that have changed the ways that people justified their inhuman behavior? How would it inform our cultural attitudes and the insidious racism that still lingers today? We see this tragicomic world turned upside down through the eyes of Doris, an Englishwoman enslaved and taken to the New World, movingly recounting experiences of tremendous hardship and the dreams of the people she has left behind, all while journeying toward an escape into freedom.

A poignant and dramatic story grounded in provocative ideas, Blonde Roots is a genuinely original, profoundly imaginative novel.