In a lacework of phrases that catch the rhythm of memory, daydream and erotic longing, she remembers her early love for Barrington, the long years of frustrated desire, the upward road to education and self-fulfilment in Britain and the simultaneous decline of her marriage. Carmel was once a beauty whose turns on the dancefloor with Barrington made them the island's golden couple. When Carmel is telling the tale, Evaristo uses the lyrical poetic voice that is her most powerful and instinctive asset. Morris, a sweet-natured, tender and clear-eyed foil to rumbustious Barrington, has long wanted his lover to live with him, but the latter's family and the vociferously godfearing sisterhood of Carmel's friends stand between the two old men and bliss.

An intelligent man of wide but patchy reading, who coins phrases with the compulsive generosity of quantitative easing, Barrington fools his wife Carmel that he has a low sex drive while conducting an energetic sex life with Morris (and a few others on the side). The constants in her work – wit, inventiveness, a love of reversals, narrative drive and a magnetic attraction to poetry – are all in sparkling evidence in Mr Loverman.īarrington, or Barry, is a character bursting with vim. Beginning as the poet of Lara, a fictionalised memoir about life with a Nigerian father and white mother, she has moved from The Emperor's Babe, a verse novel about a love affair two millennia ago between a young female poet and a Roman emperor, through Soul Tourist, a contemporary road-movie set in Europe, to Blonde Roots, a picaresque dystopia which reimagines slavery with white slaves and black masters. Evaristo's books have crisscrossed the literary, geographical and historical map.

Loverman book