Needs someone to remind him every now and then how to behave in company. In structural terms, the book oscillates between the defining present – 2010 in East London – 1960 in Antigua and a few key staging posts along the way.īarry’s flowery prose and exuberant sexually-charged mood contrast vividly with Carmen’s devout disappointment with marriage and her husband, told with a lilting poetic rhythm:īarry in 2010: ‘ He starts drinking his hot chocolate in that slurpy-slurpy way of his, putting his head down in the mug and suctioning it up, like a horse in a trough. Language, humour, richness of character, social observations and racial history combine to provide a literary feast, and in Barry a truly memorable character to stay long in the reader’s memory. These are the bare bones of the story Bernardine Evaristo tells in Mr Loverman, but she offers the reader so much more. Because Barry and Morris are gay, and have been lovers since their school days in the Caribbean. No, that honour goes to lifelong friend, Morris Courtney de la Roux. Just not with his wife of 50 years, Carmel, whom he met and married in Antigua in the 1960s. ‘Barry’ is also still passionately in love.

Mr Loverman by Bernadine Evaristo, an exuberant novel set in HACKNEY (with Antiguan roots).īarrington Jedidiah Walker is a larger-than-life 74 year-old dandy, full of erudition and charm, strutting the streets of Hackney like a preening peacock.

Mr Loverman – an exuberant novel set in Hackney (with Antiguan roots)

The loverman book