Il tono è satirico, e forse questo è il limite del romanzo: il rischio di scivolare nel macchiettistico, con l’intenzione forse di strappare qualche (amaro) sorriso. The reader knows from the outset that this is not alternate history of our own universe, because the author has included a map showing Aphrika in the North, Europa in the South, and the Caribbean islands unchanged, but renamed the West Japanese Islands.

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. Locations are a hugely important to the story, many of them being based on recognisable places but being twisted so you have to think carefully about them. Additionally, the author adds a bunch of anachronistic nonsense that makes the book even harder to read. Con uno stile scorrevole e una satira pungente, Bernrdine Evaristo porta alla luce tutta la sofferenza del popolo africano, che, nonostante siano passati più di trecento anni, è ancora vittima di pregiudizi e ahimé di fenomeni di razzismo.The story is built on this what-if scenario, everything being reversed compared to how the history really happened. If only I'd been older, wiser, more quick-witted, braver, I might have taken that one chance to run away. Bernardine is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University, London, and President of the Royal Society of Literature. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. The narrator describes her captors: `All the stories I'd heard were true because even though it was cold, they wore only cotton strips to cover their privates so they shivered and sneezed and were covered with goose pimples .

Turning history on its head and making slaves of white people doesn't make the inhumanity of such a despicable trade any more shocking, but it does give a fresh perspective. 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 . The world of Blonde Roots, in which young Doris Scagglethorpe (known by her slave name of Omorenomwara) must attempt to escape from her master if she hopes to see her family again, is not a straightforward parallel of the 18th-century landscape of the slave trade’s heyday. No wonder she prefaced the book with a quotation from that proto-postmodern himself, Nietzsche: `All things are subject to interpretation: whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

In the twenty-first century, Bwana’s descendants still own the sugar estate and are among the grandest and wealthiest families in the United Kingdom of Great Ambossa, where they still reside. It's the message that freedom is the right to choose your own bonds that makes Blonde Roots so human and real. She is not seeking to score points about whites and blacks; the thrust seems merely to be that we're no different from one another. It’s described in enough detail to be revolting, but not so much to make it unsuitable for an older YA audience. But it has seldom been done on the scale of Bernardine Evaristo's astonishing new novel which takes one of the great horrors of history and turns it on its head.