Lara

Bloodaxe Books, 2009

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1997

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A semi-autobiographical verse novel based on the author’s family history. The cover photograph is of her parents’ wedding day in Camberwell, London, 1955. (This new edition of the book is revised and expanded by a third from the 1997 edition.) The novel travels back over 150 years, seven generations and three continents. The eponymous Lara grows up as the mixed raced daughter of an Englishwoman and a Nigerian man in London of the 60s and 70s, and the novel shifts backwards from the past to the present, including the stories of her parent’s childhood and inter-racial marriage and her predecessors in England, Nigeria, Ireland, Germany and Brazil.

‘First novels don’t often make my heart beat faster….Bernardine Evaristo is a gifted black writer. Her Lara is a beautifully written novel-in-verse.’

New Statesman, (A Book of the Year)

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