She doesn't share her husband's wordiness, but her sections have a poetry of their own, with inner monologues that turn into prayers and fragments of sentences snaking down the page. She has enough on her plate with a job for Hackney council, two unhappy daughters – Donna, a single mother, and Maxine, a flighty fashion stylist – and a gaggle of gossipy friends from back home. Carmel knows that Barry is straying, just not with whom. We revisit her at 10-year intervals, through postnatal depression and an affair of her own, to a renewal of her Pentecostal faith. Interspersed with Barry's present-day narration are chapters from the point of view of his wife, Carmel, which begin on her lonely wedding night, when she's a clueless teenager marvelling at the 'diamante sky, stretching yonder into infinity', while her husband snores. (There's a lot of italics.) 'Is this not our postmodern, post-colonial prerogative?' 'And so what if me and my people choose to mash up the h-english linguish whenever we feel like it, drop our prepositions with our panties, piss in the pot of correct syntax and spelling, and mangle our grammar at random?' he demands in a soliloquy that doubles as an explanation for Evaristo's style. It shows: this is her second prose novel, but she continues to play with form, rhythm and double meanings, especially in chapters narrated by Barry, an excitable, self-taught know-it-all.

Blurrier lines would be more interesting.Įvaristo began her career as a poet, and several of her previous novels were written in verse, including The Emperor's Babe, about a black Roman girl in third-century London. This works best when the ideas are submerged in action: too often, Evaristo gives her characters sharply inked, directly opposing opinions to bounce back and forth, as with a dinner-table discussion on what the Bible has to say about homosexuality, or an argument about feminism in an adult education class. It's a fertile topic, and Evaristo plunges into a debate on everything from race, gender, sexuality and religion to the gentrification of multicultural London neighbourhoods.

A t 74, Barrington 'Barry' Walker, a Caribbean transplant to Stoke Newington in London with a church-going wife and two grown-up daughters, is 'still spruced up and sharp-suited with a rather manly swagger', still working 'a certain je ne sais whatsit.' He's also been having a secret affair with another elderly man, Morris de la Roux, since they were both teenagers in Antigua, and coming clean to his family is unthinkable.

Mr loverman book