The Emperor's Babe
From the Booker prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other
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3.8 • 9 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER
RECIPIENT OF THE WOMEN’S PRIZE OUTSTANDING CONTRIBUTION AWARD
WINNER OF THE NESTA FELLOWSHIP AWARD 2003
'Wildly entertaining, deeply affecting' Ali Smith, author of How to be both and Autumn
A coming-of-age tale to make the muses themselves roar with laughter and weep for pity -- sassy, razor-sharp and transformative.
Londinium, AD 211. Zuleika is a modern girl living in an ancient world. She's a back-alley firecracker, a scruffy Nubian babe with tangled hair and bare feet - and she's just been married off a fat old Roman. Life as a teenage bride is no joke but Zeeks is a born survivor. She knows this city like the back of her hand: its slave girls and drag queens, its shining villas and rotting slums. She knows how to get by. Until one day she catches the eye of the most powerful man on earth, the Roman Emperor, and her trouble really starts . . .
Silver-tongued and merry-eyed, this is a story in song and verse, a joyful mash-up of today and yesterday. Kaleidoscoping distant past and vivid present, The Emperor's Babe asks what it means to be a woman and to survive in this thrilling, brutal, breathless world.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Bernardine Evaristo’s Inside Story: “I think this is where I really gave myself freedom to play around as a writer, to experiment and just have fun. It was such a joy to write and it came quickly, too. I just remember laughing while I was writing.
“It began just as a few poems that I wrote for a Poetry Society residency I had at the Museum of London in 1999. I was walking around the Roman galleries which they used to have there. I had studied Latin and classical civilisations at school, and it all kind of came back me. I had known about black people being in Britain 1,800 years ago—the legion of Moors stationed in the Roman army at Hadrian’s Wall and the like—so I thought how great it would be to write a book about a black girl growing up in Roman London. I started writing some poems and then met my editor, selling him the idea of a novel in verse.
“The book is very satirical, but it’s also very anachronistic. It’s historical, but also very contemporary because I play around with time and space and cultural references, taking the reader on this journey of a young woman growing up 1,800 years ago, but hopefully one that feels fresh and modern. Being in verse, it flowed very easily for me. I think I was more of a poet than I am now.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Employing the same narrative verse style that served her so well in her debut, Lara, British writer Evaristo travels back in time to tell the story of Zuleika, a libidinous but frustrated Sudanese woman who comes of age in a Roman-conquered London in A.D. 211. Spotted at the age of 11 by rich Roman senator Lucius Aurelius Felix, "a man thrice my age and thrice my girth," she lands in the lap of luxury when a wedding quickly takes place. But Felix's lack of libido soon turns the marriage into a prison, and when he begins to travel, jazzy teenager Zuleika hits the social scene in the urban maze that is Londinium and receives some flattering attention from a visiting Roman emperor, Septimus Severus. The two begin a brief but torrid affair until Evaristo wraps up her thin plot by sending Severus off to war as Felix returns to find that the entire community knows about the affair. Plot problems aside, most of this is an excuse for Evaristo to stretch her poetic muscles as she creates a beautiful, passionate African-cum-Roman woman as seen through the imagination of a highly liberated and sexual 21st-century poet. Despite the occasional burst of purple verse, she succeeds admirably in bringing a difficult and treacherous conceit to fruition, liberally indulging in irreverent asides, vivid vernacular speech and clever puns. The generally high quality of the poetry overshadows the failure of the book to develop into a genuine, full-fledged novel. This is a vividly imagined albeit distinctly modern look at a woman's role in Roman times by a talented writer with a fertile mind and a playful spirit.
