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  • Published: 16 April 2020
  • ISBN: 9780241145784
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $22.99

Mr Loverman

From the Booker prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other




A ground-breaking exploration of Britain's older Carribean community, from the Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other

Barrington Jedidiah Walker is seventy-four and leads a double life. Born and bred in Antigua, he's lived in Hackney since the sixties. A flamboyant, wise-cracking local character with a dapper taste in retro suits and a fondness for quoting Shakespeare, Barrington is a husband, father and grandfather - but he is also secretly homosexual and in a relationship with his great childhood friend, Morris.

Mr Loverman is a ground-breaking exploration of Britain's older Caribbean community, which explodes cultural myths and fallacies and shows the extent of what can happen when people fear the consequences of being true to themselves.

  • Published: 16 April 2020
  • ISBN: 9780241145784
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Bernardine Evaristo

Bernardine Evaristo is the author of Lara, winner of the Emma Best Book Award in 1999, The Emperor's Babe and Soul Tourists. She is a former Poet in Residence at the Museum of London, and her work has been widely anthologized. She won a prestigious Arts Council Writers Award in 2000.

Also by Bernardine Evaristo

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Praise for Mr Loverman

Bernardine Evaristo can take any story from any time and turn it into something vibrating with life

Ali Smith

This riproaring, full-bodied riff on sex, secrecy and family is Bernardine Evaristo's seventh book. If you don't yet know her work, you should - she says things about modern Britain that no one else does

Guardian

Evaristo has a lot going on in this unusual urban romance, but beneath her careful study of race and sexuality is a beautiful love story. Not many writers could have two old men having sexual intercourse in a bedsit to a soundtrack of Shabba Ranks's Mr Loverman and save it from bad taste, much less make it sublime. But the hero of this book, and his canny creator, make everything taste just fine

Daily Telegraph

An undeniably bold and energetic writer, whose world view is anything but one-dimensional

Sunday Times

Transforms our often narrow perceptions of gay men in England . . . Comical, agonising and, ultimately, moving

Independent

Audacious genre-bending, in-yer-face wit and masterly retellings of underwritten corners of history are the hallmarks of Evaristo's wit

New Statesman

Heartbreaking yet witty, this is a story that needed to be told

Observer

I loved this novel. Barrington is flamboyant, complex and in love with his childhood friend Morris. It really makes you think of all the stories, forbidden and forgotten, from the elders who made England their home

Luan Goldie, Guardian