Blonde Roots

''A phenomenal book. It is so ingenious and so novel. Think The Handmaid''s Tale meets Noughts and Crosses with a bit of Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll thrown in. This should be thought of as a feminist classic.'' Women''s Prize for Fiction Podcast

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.

''A bold and brilliant game of counterfactual history. Evaristo keep[s] her wit and anger at a spicy simmer throughout'' Daily Telegraph

''So human and real. Re-imagines past and present with refreshing humour and intelligence'' Guardian

''A brilliant satire whose flashes of comedy make the underlying tragedy all the more poignant'' Scotland on Sunday