Despite having introduced myself in the “forum” earlier in the day, I felt I had to do it again as I approached the baying mob. As I wrote the novel, I came to relate to Bea even more strongly – like me, she moved to London from the north of England seeking a different kind of life from the one she had grown up expecting to lead. She was ambitious and independent. She was unmarried and childless (and given the shortage of men in the years after the First World War, she seemed likely to remain that way) – but she set out to make a different kind of life for herself. I admired that, and I admired her courage in moving hundreds of miles from her home town at a time when that was fairly unusual.

This starts off as a bit of a swarmy romance and I really debated whether to continue. It takes a while for it to get creepy. But once Pammie arrives on the scene, it gets interesting. This pushed a lot of negative buttons for me, so I am the first to admit my rating MIGHT be a case of 'It's probably NOT you, it's me'.' First of all, this is really a series of interconnected short stories, rather than a true 'novel', and I always have trouble digesting such.Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. But Emily being a bit naive about how this is all going to work out does make for a good story and one that moves along at a brisk pace. It’s like watching a horror story where Pammie is the monster. The second Carole (who pulled herself from difficult origins, via a Maths degree at Oxford to a banking job in the City), Bummi (her mother) and La Tisha (her one time schoolfriend now working in a supermarket as a young Mum of three children by three absent fathers). I found this a strong novel – there is polemic and challenge, but also warmth, humour and self-awareness. Update: This predictably has won the Booker 2019 (jointly). And if it is the best book of the shortlist, I am very happy about my decision not to spend time reading any others shortlisted this year.

Even though one of the main themes is being a person of colour in a world of white supremacy (open or hidden, depending on situation), and even though I belong to the entitled, privileged group of people who have a choice whether racism is a topic to be bothered with or not (as opposed to those who have to live with the issue whether they like it or not as it is imposed on them by a dominant culture), I strongly identified with all these characters' problems and issues with racism, - because their stories are told with a loving, caring voice that humanises the pain and injustice. There comes a point in this narrative where you’d rather hang around the characters you’ve met than be introduced to still more new ones. The narrative needed to develop and deepen – to flesh out what has gone before, to draw the reader into the world the characters inhabit. Clearly, Evaristo didn't live up to what she set out to do, and so everything remained on a surface level. Instead of building the story and developing the protagonists and their relationships, we are given yet another batch of brief biographies, all of which are okay in isolation but they are, quite frankly, underwhelming in the context as a the whole.We were paired up this morning,” he said proudly to the other men in the group. “We had a good time, didn’t we, Em?”