Blonde Roots (Winner Of Orange Youth Panel Prize 2009)

Description:
Welcome to a world turned upside down. One minute, Doris, from England, is 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 hold of a slave-ship sailing to the New World ...In this fantastically imaginative inversion of the transatlantic slave trade - in which 'whytes' are enslaved by black people - Bernardine Evaristo has created a thought-provoking satire that is as accessible and readable as it is intelligent and insightful. 'Blonde Roots' brings the shackles and cries of long-ago barbarity uncomfortably close and raises timely questions about the society of today.

Review:
'A hugely imaginative tale that invites important debates, challenging fundamental perceptions of race, culture and history' Independent on Sunday 'This brilliant novel will fulfil [Evaristo's] purpose of making readers view the transatlantic slave trade with fresh eyes' The Times 'Reimagines past and present with refreshing humour and intelligence ... human and real' Guardian

Prizes:
Winner of Orange Youth Panel Prize 2009.

Author Biography:
Bernardine Evaristo is the author of three novels, Lara, The Emperor's Babe and Soul Tourists, all of which fuse fiction with poetry. Blonde Roots is her first prose novel. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004 and the Royal Society of Arts in 2006. She lives in London.