'Lara is a wonderful piece - extraordinarily beautiful - rich and evocative - fascinating in its span of time and continents. Like all the best writing, by the end I felt not only a little older, but a lot wiser' - ANDREA LEVY. 'A short, lyrical, vividly real novel-in-verse, dipping 150 years into the past to explore the family history of a British woman with a Nigerian father and English mother. It's funny, touching, informative, passionate and very easy to read. If you're tired of novels that all seem the same, this one's a complete original' - Daily Telegraph (Books of the Year). 'Adventurous, compelling and utterly original' - The Times on Bernardine Evaristo.

Bernardine Evaristo was born and raised in London, where she still lives. She has published four cross-genre novels: Lara (new edition, Bloodaxe Books, 2009); Blonde Roots (Penguin, 2008), a prose novel in which Africans enslave Europeans; a novel-with-verse, Soul Tourists (Penguin 2005), which featured ghosts of colours including Pushkin, Shakespeare's Dark Lady of the Sonnets and Alessandro dei Medici; and The Emperor's Babe (Penguin, 2001), a verse novel about a black girl growing up in Roman London nearly 2000 years ago. She co-edited the Granta new writing anthology NW15 in 2007 with novelist Maggie Gee; has written short fiction and drama for BBC radio and literary criticism for the Guardian, Times and Independent; and is an Associate Editor of the international literature magazine Wasafiri. She has taken part in over 60 international tours as a writer. See http://www.bevaristo.net http://www.bevaristo.wordpress.com