I downloaded this on my kindle what feels like forever ago now, after it co-won (still annoyed about that) the Booker prize last year. I'm not a big fan of short stories, but the way that these interconnected and the vibrancy of the characters in such a small amount of words made this a really great read.
Girl, Woman, Other follows the story of 12 people, mostly women, Black and British. Each story encapsulates important parts of that person's life: there's a struggling mother-daughter relationship (from both the mother and daughter's points of view), a move to no longer recognising your assigned at birth gender, a discovery of what it means to be queer for one person, a forceful coming to terms with your own prejudice, older people, younger people, richer and poorer, immigrants and emigrants.
The writing was almost poetic: it doesn't have a standard paragraph narrative structure, but flows with the story, and very few full stops. It helped you to get swept up in the speech and dynamics of the characters' stories. The characters are all connected to at least one, and more often many, other characters in the book in a whole host of different ways, which made the text as a whole more coherent. With every new story I was looking out for links to the characters I'd already come to know and love, and each new link brought a new perspective on a character I already thought I'd figured out.
This really is an excellent book, and I only wish it would have won the Booker Prize alone. I gave this five stars and would recommend for fans of Elizabeth Acevedo, 'Queenie' and those looking for more perspectives in fiction on the broad experiences that can make up what it's like to be Black and British.
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