Bernadine Evaristo shoulders weighty themes lightly: Girl, Woman, Other reviewed

It’s a slippery word, ‘other’. Taken in one light, it throws up barriers and insists on divisions. It is fearful and finger-pointing: them, not us. But looked at in another way, it is rangy, open and expansive. It suggests horizons, not walls.

That first meaning has done much heavy lifting in discussions of Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other. As the first black British woman to be awarded the prize, this was perhaps inevitable. Evaristo cuts an unmistakable dash through the ranks of past winners: they have been, on the whole, more pale and — damningly — a lot more male. The Booker judges hardly steadied the debate with their controversy-courting decision to share the prize between Evaristo’s novel and Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments — against the rules and the wishes of Gaby Wood, the Booker literary director. It was a clumsy move, which encouraged hair-splitting rather than inclusivity.