But at times it feels that Evaristo is so intent on establishing the details of her alternative world that the emotional reality takes a while to catch up. In the third section, however, the reader is given more space to engage with their emotional lives. After a whipping that leaves her scarred for life, Doris is sent to a plantation run by her master’s son as punishment for trying to escape. Here, she becomes part of the community of whytes who have lived for several generations in slavery and who, despite the threat of brutality that hovers over them, have carved out a life that includes makeshift family ties, solidarity and kindness.

The world of Blonde Roots, in which young Doris Scagglethorpe (known by her slave name of Omorenomwara) must attempt to escape from her master if she hopes to see her family again, is not a straightforward parallel of the 18th-century landscape of the slave trade’s heyday. Rather, it is a slightly surreal, alternative reality, embracing multiple historical epochs, in which every instance of racial and colonial prejudice is inverted. The England of Doris’s childhood is medieval and feudal, but Great Ambossa, the small but wealthy island off the main continent of Aphrika, with its capital of Londolo, shares features of our age with aspects of a futuristic dystopia. Under the city streets runs a long-disused underground railway, used by the resistance to help slaves escape. Parties of blak tourists take trips into the whyte ghettos to marvel at the poverty as tourists do now to the townships of South Africa; the Ambossan working classes shout abuse at the few free whytes who live in the suburbs - ‘Wigger, go home! You’re taking our jobs!’ Welcome to a world turned upside down. One minute, Doris, from England, is playing hide-and-seek with her sisters in the fields behind their cottage. The next, someone puts a bag over her head and she ends up in the hold of a slave-ship sailing to the New World . . . I went to the library, as we couldn’t afford to buy books. As a teenager I discovered James Baldwin and Audre Lorde – it’s so wonderful that a new generation are connecting to them. I read Thor Heyerdahl about his travels in the South Pacific – I was a child growing up in boring suburban Woolwich; we never had any money and didn’t go on holiday, so to read about these places and adventures was mind-opening. Books opened the world to me. A bold and brilliant game of counterfactual history. Evaristo keep[s] her wit and anger at a spicy simmer throughout' Daily Telegraph

Retailers:

People might not think I’m an outsider if they look at my CV and the organisations I’m associated with. But I feel that I’m still an uncompromising person and writer. I work within the systems to change them, because I think there is a limit to what you can do when you are outside the power structures. Absolutely. Now there are more people of colour on television in a single day than there were in my entire childhood. Making the work happen, rather than waiting for other people to offer you opportunities – that’s very much the job of the writer. It’s about creating those characters and stories that need to be told, rather than waiting for someone else to tell them. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ One character recalls her days of theatre-based activism in the 1980s … did you draw on your own memories?

A phenomenal book. It is so ingenious and so novel. Think The Handmaid's Tale meets Noughts and Crosses with a bit of Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll thrown in. This should be thought of as a feminist classic.' Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast

READERS GUIDE

Toni Morrison said: ‘If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.’ Did you feel that? Sometimes you hear guys talking about the novel being dead, but the novel is one of the most interesting forms. I love Ali Smith. I’m a big fan of Diana Evans. I set up the Complete Works mentoring scheme for poets of colour and all those poets are doing amazing things. Toni Morrison – the beauty of her language, her profundity of vision, the complexity of her storytelling. Derek Walcott is my favourite poet – he came from a tiny Caribbean island and through his perspective on humanity spoke across divides to people all over the world. A provocative novel that upends the history of the transatlantic slave trade, reversing and reexamining notions of savagery and civilization, as it follows a young woman's journey to freedom.