Reviewed by clementine on
Reading updates
- Started reading
- 8 November, 2019: Finished reading
- 8 November, 2019: Reviewed
Mr Loverman
by Bernardine Evaristo
COMING SOON AS A MAJOR BBC TELEVISION DRAMA STARRING LENNIE JAMES
A moving and funny novel about an exuberant, closeted family man living as himself for the first time in over 60 years, from the Booker-prize winning author of Girl, Woman, Other.
***
Barrington Jedidiah Walker is seventy-four and leads a double life.
Born and bred in Antigua, he's lived in Hackney since the sixties. A flamboyant, wise-cracking local character with a dapper taste in retro suits and a fondness for quoting Shakespeare, Barrington is a husband, father and grandfather - but he is also secretly lovers with his great childhood friend, Morris.
His deeply religious and disappointed wife, Carmel, thinks he sleeps with other women. When their marriage goes into meltdown, Barrington wants to divorce Carmel and live with Morris, but after a lifetime of fear and deception, will he manage to break away?
Mr Loverman is a ground-breaking exploration of Britain's older Caribbean community, which explodes cultural myths and fallacies and shows the extent of what can happen when people fear the consequences of being true to themselves.
***
‘Transforms our often-narrow perceptions of gay men in England’ Independent
'Brokeback Mountain with ackee and saltfish and old people' Dawn French
‘Heartbreaking yet witty, this is a story that needed to be told’ Observer