Blonde Roots cover art

Blonde Roots

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Blonde Roots

By: Bernardine Evaristo
Narrated by: Charlotte Beaumont, Ben Arogundade
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER

RECIPIENT OF THE WOMEN’S PRIZE OUTSTANDING CONTRIBUTION AWARD

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 listenable 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

© Bernadine Evaristo 2008 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

©2008 Bernardine Evaristo (P)2020 Penguin Audio Black Creators Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Science Fiction

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Morgan's Run cover art
Not So Stories cover art
A Free Man of Color cover art
Cereus Blooms at Night cover art
A Queen in Hiding cover art
The Mythic Dream cover art
Fruit of the Lemon cover art
Island Songs cover art
Women in War cover art
She Would Be King cover art
This One Sky Day cover art
All stars
Most relevant
For a writer I normally enjoy, this book was disappointing. She did not make good use of an original idea, i.e. reversal of the black and white roles in slavery. I don’t think anything new was said about slavery, which any decent person knows is and was wrong, regardless of the perpetrators. Ben Arogundade reads well and with a dignified tone. Charlotte Beaumont’s reading is too flat.

Disappointing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I wasn't sure how much I was enjoying this book to start but by half way through I couldn't get back to it quickly enough. The whole concept was very clever and several scenes jolted me back to what this was based on.
Well constructed and well narrated, recommended.

Gripping and thought provoking

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
If you are reading this you are probably aware that Bernadine Evaristo reimagines a world where it is the technologies of people of colour, located in the Africa continent, where the evolutionary story begins, as she constructs people from that continent as superior to all the other so-called races and it is whyte people, originating from the continent of Europe, who are at the bottom of the evolutionary pile. This means of course that white readers get a taste of enslavement from the perspective of the whyte people from Europa and, in that respect, Evaristo pulls no punches in her detailed descriptions of life on a slave ship and on the plantations.
This is a very creative and clever reversal of historical events and Evaristo goes a long way towards convincing us that the world is very different to the one In which we are currently living. It feels as if a simple geographical twist of fate is what enables the huge shift in the evolution of humankind. Some of the most chilling chapters are the ones in the centre of the book, where the whole horror of scientific racism is reimagined as a process whereby blak people are placed at the top of the evolutionary cycle and whyte people at the bottom, through a whole process of measurement and so-called anthropometrics. It’s a very scary reminder of the scientific racism of the 19th and 20th centuries and every so-called scientist should be forced to read this book, as should every schoolchild, both in Europe and in the United States. This book is an excellent introduction to the horrors of the enslavement of millions of humans, especially if you have bothered to read about these histories is before.

Brilliant reversal of historical events

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Absolutely loved this.
If you're white and ever wondered how you'd feel as a slave. Read this. If you're white and haven't thought about it, then you should definitely read this book.
It's poignant, hard hitting and has speckles of humour.
Bernadine writes so wel, the whole book just flows.
Read this book

A Must Read/Listen

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Great concept for a story and supported with plenty of detail - albeit making for uncomfortable reading in places. Let down somewhat in the telling by the male narrator - too laboured - I actually found it less irritating when the audio speed was increased to x1.2 for the male voice sections.

Good but felt short-changed

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews