Blonde Roots

The most provocative debut novel of the year, "a dizzying satire" (The New Yorker) that "boldly turns history on its head" (Elle). "A light entertainment on the surface, but with hidden depths; nicely written"  (Kirkus Reviews).

What if the history of the transatlantic slave trade had been reversed and Africans had enslaved Europeans? How would that have changed the ways that people justified their inhuman behaviour? How would it inform our cultural attitudes and the insidious racism that still lingers today? 

We see this tragicomic world turned upside down through the eyes of Doris, an Englishwoman enslaved and taken to the New World, movingly recounting experiences of tremendous hardship and the dreams of the people she has left behind, all while journeying toward an escape into freedom.

"Novelists are irresistibly drawn to the ‘what if’ game…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 Times UK

A poignant and dramatic story grounded in provocative ideas, Blonde Roots is a genuinely original, profoundly imaginative novel.