This novel was the joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize with “The Testaments” by Margaret Atwood. The first thing to strike you is the lack of grammar. There are no full stops at the end of each sentence or inverted commas when a character is speaking. At one point, when a non-binary character is featured, the pronoun they/their is used rather than she/her. Of course as this is creative writing, everything is allowed. However, in my opinion it doesn’t work and all it shows is how useful grammar is. At times it is overly confusing and passages have to be re-read. The trans movement may also have a problem. Having a plural for a singular can be bothersome. I wasn’t sure if a character was on their own or not. I’d suggest a unique pronoun is invented.

As you can no doubt already surmise, this is quite a woke novel. The good thing is at times it can also laugh at itself, like when the ultimate number of genders is considered by Morgan. The novel is the story of twelve characters, mostly black women of various sexual orientations living in London mostly who are mostly interconnected in some way with each other. However, there is no overarching story. It is like a series of biographies as they deal with their sexualities, racism and the setbacks/successes of life.

Amma, a black lesbian is the first to tell her story. She rebelled against the establishment in her youth and formed a fringe theatre group with little success, However, with the rise of wokedom she is now in demand. The opening night to her play serves somewhat to bring all the characters together. She is sexually liberated, who slept around alot in her youth and now enjoys threesomes.

Some of the other characters are not quite so interesting, and at times banal. Her daughter Yazz for instance, who is struggling to find love and is quite full of herself.

It is difficult to really grow fond of any of the characters, so many are covered. Some of them also appear to overcome horrific trauma through sheer force of will. This could have been dealt with in more detail.

Where I found this novel very strong is phonetically. You can hear the black women’s voices clearly talking to you.

All in all, I give this novel three stars out of five.