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

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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. Blonde Roots is full of literary and historical resonances, including aping pro-slavery `eye-witness accounts' of the civilising effects of slavery, and, most tellingly, Joseph Conrad's seminal novel about exploitation in Belgian Congo, Heart of Darkness (Penguin Classics) . Doris had my sympathy, but only held my interest fully in the final third of the book, especially the last chapters. I swept through the first 40 pages without stopping, then paused for thought and decided to read them all again as I wanted to soak up every message and nuance in this book.

Blonde Roots is the tale of Doris, an intelligent young woman who is enslaved to Chief Kaga Konata Katamba I, a powerful absentee sugar baron and former slave trader. The reader here is drawn into stories that are shameful by Evaristo’s clever inversion of master and slave(ry). It just makes my brain go crazy and I can't enjoy the story because I'm getting irked by all the ridiculous inconsistencies every other page. It's sort of kind of our world, except geography is randomly different (and I don't mean place names, but actual continents and stuff are not the same shape). The world of Blonde Roots, in which young Doris Scagglethorpe (known by her slave name of Omorenomwara) must attempt to escape from her master if she hopes to see her family again, is not a straightforward parallel of the 18th-century landscape of the slave trade’s heyday.

Think The Handmaid's Tale meets Noughts and Crosses with a bit of Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll thrown in. The main plot points were too predictable and I never believed in the world or characters enough to find it exciting or to really care. And, that is probably the case here, but the author took something that is known, well-known, and twisted it for her own purposes and I don't know what those purposes are/were. 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. Blonde Roots turns the whole world on its nappy head, and you'll be surprised how different it looks -- and how similar.

Bernardine Evaristo was born in Woolwich, south east London, the fourth of eight children, to an English mother and Nigerian father. This section includes how he came to be the Bwana (master) of Doris and also sets unsubtle expectations of “twists” to come. The story dashes off the first page as Doris makes her escape during the annual celebration of Voodoomass.It looks beautiful at first, but actually shows slavers throwing the dead and dying overboard as a typhoon approaches. The second section is Chief Kaga Konata Katamba’s tracts, describing how he became wealthy trading slaves, and justifying the trade. But it has seldom been done on the scale of Bernardine Evaristo's astonishing new novel which takes one of the great horrors of history and turns it on its head. 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 .