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About the Author

Bernardine Evaristo is the award-winning Anglo-Nigerian author of several books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora: past, present, real, imagined. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker Prize in 2019. Her writing also spans short fiction, reviews, essays, drama and writing for radio. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University, London, and Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. She was made an MBE in 2009.

As a literary activist for inclusion, Bernardine has founded a number of successful initiatives, including Spread the Word writer development agency (1995–ongoing), the Complete Works mentoring scheme for poets of colour (2007–2017) and the Brunel International African Poetry Prize (2012–ongoing).

PENGUIN BOOKS

SOUL TOURISTS

‘Free-wheeling, genre-busting, exuberant and sexy, this is not a novel for the faint-hearted’ Guardian

‘In Soul Tourists Bernardine Evaristo has mixed poetry and prose to produce a bouncy, sometimes touching novel about the search for love and belonging … The writing is fecund, stimulating and witty … Evaristo remains an undeniably bold and energetic writer, whose world view is anything but one-dimensional’ Sunday Times

‘Bernardine Evaristo’s dazzling Soul Tourists explores realms that are more than usually out of the ordinary … Evaristo, radically refusing to be confined by genres, has written the story of a love affair, a road trip and a detour into hidden aspects of Europe’s black history that manages to be thought-provoking, funky and funny’ Metro

‘The story is told in an inspired mixture of prose, blank verse and haiku, as it leaps energetically from interior to exterior, dialogue to monologue, containing moments of lucid imagery and sex-starved comedy’ The Times

‘A roller coaster road movie in print where the language twists and turns more than a path through the Pyrenees. Evaristo crosses the border between prose, poetry and film script and exposes the hidden face of black European history in the process’ Independent on Sunday, Books of the Year

‘One of Britain’s most innovative writers, Bernardine Evaristo always dares to be different. Soul Tourists is a reaffirmation of her unique and stimulating style’ New Nation

‘This odyssey is a book to pack for its gypsy spirit and its summer music’ Peter Forbes, Independent

‘Bernardine Evaristo is one of those writers who should be read by everyone, everywhere’ Elif Shafak

‘Bernardine Evaristo is the most daring, imaginative and innovative of writers’ Inua Ellams

‘Bernardine Evaristo … is one of Britain’s best writers’ Nikesh Shukla

Dedication

For my mother, Jacqueline Mary Evaristo, who is simply amazing

Epigraph

They say travel broadens the mind,
but you must have the mind.

G. K. Chesterton,
The Poet and the Lunatics

The Shipwreck, 1987

The Blackwall Tunnel is the birth canal forcing me underneath the pressurized gallons of the river that splits the city into north and south.