The 2010s were a hugely significant decade for the Booker, largely due to the shift in rules which came into place in 2014. From that year onwards, the Prize was open to all novels published in the English language, replacing the long-held (and many might say, dated) criteria that focused on authors of British, Irish and Commonwealth heritage. This shift led to a lot of hand-wringing and fretting about the potential “domination” of the Prize by US authors, and a dilution of what the Prize stood for.

Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives of 12 characters, predominantly black and female, in the UK over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Each of the 12 main sections is told in the voice of those characters, whose lives cross over, in some cases intimately and in others highly tangentially, with the other characters in the book. The first chapter focuses on the build-up to the launch of its central character, Amma's new play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey, opening at the National Theatre. The final chapter takes place at the play's afterparty, at which many of the present-day characters are present or in the minds of those attending.