Girl, Woman, Other

By: Bernardine Evaristo

Narrated by: Anna-Maria Nabirye

Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins

Publisher's Summary

Brought to you by Penguin. 

Winner of The Booker Prize 2019

Shortlisted for The Women's Prize for Fiction 2020

The Sunday Times best seller

This is Britain as you've never heard it.

This is Britain as it has never been told.

From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the 20th century to the teens of the 21st, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of 12 characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years. They're each looking for something - a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope.... 

©2019 Bernardine Evaristo (P)2019 Penguin Audio

Critic Reviews

"The actress Anna-Maria Nabirye projects the characters superbly: she has a full, low timbre and a powerful directness." (The Times)

"Masterful...A choral love song to black womanhood in modern Great Britain." (Elle)  

"Ambitious, flowing and all-encompassing, an offbeat narrative that'll leave your mind in an invigorated whirl...[It] unites poetry, social history, women's voices and beyond." (Stylist) 

'Girl, Woman, Other' Underwhelming

Girl, Woman, Other, is best read first, to see the arrangement of the text on the page, and to understand and appreciate the experimental prose/poetic style - as composed by Bernardine Evaristo. Seeing and reading the book may add the layer of literary depth unseen in the Audio edition.
The Audio is devoid of poetic rhythms, and the Reading does not reflect/convey experimental written form. The Audio version exposes formulaic writing patterns and a lack of character development.
Read the book first?

A thing of beauty...

Not a review, only to say that I definitely didn’t expect it to be as remarkable.

Great novel - flaws in narration.

Great characters and story, but let down a bit by the narrator who, although she has a good quality voice, often pauses where she shouldn't, or doesn't pause where she should, with incorrect emphasis. Many words are mispronounced, which indicates that the narrator is not familiar with the word itself. I agree with another reviewer who says the narrator needed someone in the recording sessions to direct her performance, spot the mistakes and fix them. Surely every audiobook performance is supervised by someone other than a sound engineer? I found myself listening out for the next mistake, and the next one, But I still enjoyed the story.

Complicated Read

Too many characters, too many to remember! Have a pen and paper ready to take notes...

Nothing happens!

So yeah. I thought this would be an interesting read, and it won The Booker. How could I go wrong, right? With one click of a button it seems. The narrator did well but the author should learn what a story is.

The premise is a good one and I liked some of the characters but absolutely nothing happens in this book. It is just about ordinary women and their ordinary struggles. I like a plot, I like a beginning middle and a satisfying end. This had nothing.

An amazing book, a tender look into gender identity, into womanhood.

The narrator has an amazing and powerful voice that keeps you on edge until the end! Thanks again!

Reader was great, very english

Loved this book , highly recommend it. Great read , wonderful characters. The trader was great. I love the English accent

A beautiful read

Wonderfully intertwined stories,with each one even mor captivating than the last. Couldn’t recommend this book more.

I couldn't put it down

Really enjoyed this book. I couldn't put it down. very different! Definitely enlightened on black,lesbian,Bi world we live in.
highly recommend this book.

I could follow the Narrator. Unfortunately.

I couldn't follow the narrator, so unfortunately I have missed the content of the book.
I did read this in another review, but unfortunately the Narrator needs more practice to articulate what she is reading.
She has an appropriate voice and accents for the content, but lacks sufficient skill, which results in a story you just can't follow.

Utterly terrible audio version of a good book

As a book, this is a compelling, diverting, well-crafted and beautiful story of 12 women and their twentieth and twenty-first century lives. The book itself is highly recommended. The audio, however, is not.

The actor here mispronounces so many words -- why did the audio editor or production person not tell her? She has a far smaller vocabulary than the author (who writes beautifully) and she doesn't understand the sense of many of the sentences she recites, putting the wrong expression into many clauses, pausing in odd places, generally ignoring the rhythm and meaning of the text. The mispronunciation involves removing syllables from words ('superority' for superiority, 'convality' for conviviality, and many more), inserting extra syllables ('VilINinus' for Vilnius, lustrious for 'lustrous'), and approximating unfamiliar words ('dissimating' for decimating, 'vivosity' for viscosity). She can't pronounce any of the French phrases used by the pompous professor father, making him seem dim rather than pompous, and she doesn't really differentiate voices for the characters. Her own voice is pleasant and well-produced, but she really needed input from the production team and/or author (plus more actor training). But the production team are also terrible in other ways: there is a lot of bad editing, which often leaves in the traces of stumbles in the reading or cuts them out inexpertly so the text doesn't flow. Penguin Audio presumably outsourced this recording to a small production company and didn't properly check the results--they should be derided for this since it is a serious disservice to the author of the book.

I would strongly encourage Evaristo to protest at the shoddiness of this production and demand a new recording. Her story deserves better.

Too many mistakes

It was jarring each time the narrator made a mistake. She even mispronounced the word “pronunciation”. The actor and drag queen, Divine, was referred to as Diveen. Hopefully, there will be a re-recording of the book as the story was very engaging.

Good story but distracting narration

The narrator made so many mistakes in pronunciation that it detracted from my enjoyment of the book.

Particularly irritating was the fact that there were two characters - Waris and Bibi - whose names she pronounced in two different ways. War-is and Wear-is. Bibby and Beebee.

A Great Book, but -

This story is lovely, an engaging and interesting account of several women's lives and how they interact with one another. It would have been such an enjoyable listen but for one thing. The narrator's constant mispronunciation of words. I'm not talking about things that are difficult to say, but words in common usage (it's deMONstrably not demonSTRAYably for example). It got to the point where I was counting how many words were wrongly spoken in a given time. Five or six within half an hour is far too many in my opinion, and it was really grating. I had to stop listening. Which was a great shame.

Distracting narration

I found the narration too distracting to get involved in the stories being told. There were so many mispronunciations - did noone listen to this before it was released?

A brilliant story - slightly spoiled by the reader

I actually listened to this book in one go. Very engaging and a real story of a range of today's womxn.
However, the reader made so many errors in pronunciation of words and phrases that it was rather irritating. She was better with the traditional African parts and OK with the Caribbean parts but didn't seem to have more than GCSE level understanding of English, if that.
I wonder why she was asked to be the reader!? But more concerning, I wonder why the publisher didn't get her to re-record all the bits she couldn't pronounce properly?

Great story, read poorly

Such an excellent story let down by really poor reading. The reader pronounced words incorrectly and it was difficult to distinguish between the characters. She read with one note throughout. Tbh, after a short time I decided that this was one that I was going to read myself because the reader was ruining it for me. How much better it would be if they could get a better actress to read this.

HORRIBLE NARRATION, APPALLING ACTUALLY...

Audible, Penguin, whomever, I suggest you re-record this ASAP. The narrator’s mispronunciations are too frequent and distracting.

Pallor as parlour
Braggadocio as braddocio
Conviviality as conviliaty
Disease-riddled as disease-raddled
Laissez faire as lahsay fair


Also, her Nigerian accent is laughable at best and caricature at worst - as a Nigerian, I struggled to understand the words she was trying to pronounce such as “aso-oke”, “Ibadan” etc. The emphasis she placed on the words made me wonder whether she was parodying especially the parts that were in pidgin English. I almost gave up on listening there. It was ATROCIOUS.

All the intellectualism / racialism / feminism / genderism force-feeding coupled with the incoherent narration meant that I just couldn’t get into the stories. This narrator though, has done Bernardine Evaristo a great disservice.

Brilliant

Absolutely beautiful, moving, well written, witty, and clever. I laughed, I cried, and I was educated. What more can you ask for from a book? Fantastic.

Honestly? I was very glad to get to the end.

Interesting storylines but characters too briefly drawn, I neither cared for or about any of them. The undercurrents of anger that suffused each story left me feeling exhausted and angry, the mispronunciations throughout the narration so frequent I began to wonder if it was deliberate. (?) I’m sorry, not for me.