I was well aware after it won the Booker Prize in 2019 that Girl, Woman, Other was a critical and popular success, but I’m not sure I would have read it without my wife’s fulsome recommendation. I’m very pleased I did. It’s a novel with such distinctive and vibrant energy, and quite unlike anything I can recall reading before. It’s a beautiful kaleidoscope of the experiences of black, British women and a cross-section of society whose voices have for so long been largely muted in, or entirely absent from, UK fiction.

I’m probably guilty of nitpicking, but I wonder about the author’s decision to (almost) eliminate punctuation from the novel. It must, in part at least, have been motivated by a desire to allow the many voices to come across distinctly and singularly, but I found it ended up having the opposite effect and muffling the differences between the characters. No matter. It certainly didn’t diminish my enjoyment and clearly didn’t impede the huge commercial success of the novel.