Lara

We published Bernardine Evaristo's verse novel 'Lara' in June 1997 and by December it had been chosen as a Daily Telegraph, New Stateseman and The Journal 'Book of the Year' -- all leading UK newspapers. For 1999 it has been selected as the Best of Black & Asian Writing by Well Worth Reading in the UK. Lara traces the two ancestral strands of a girl called Lara who grows up in London in the sixties and seventies. Her father, Taiwo, is Nigerian and her mother, Ellen, is English and it goes into both sides of her family history. On Taiwo's side it follows his grandfather's journey from slavery in Brazil in the eighteenth century, to freedom in the Brazilian Quarter of Lagos,Nigeria. It follows Taiwo's childhood in Lagos when Nigeria was a British colony, his journey to Britain to study in 1949 and his eventual meeting and marriage, to a white Englishwoman called Ellen. The book also traces Ellen's childhood in London during the war years, and her mother Edith's poor working class childhood in London at the turn of the century. Finally, all strands come together in Lara who begins her own odyssey as she grows up a mixed-race child in an exclusively white area of London.


Genre: General Fiction