Description

Britain has a new national pastime: knowing your shade.

TrueHue’s thirty-second cheek swab sorts every citizen into one of nine Heritage Bands. Each result comes on a gold-bordered certificate stamped Accurate to Nature. Schools love it, insurers love it, and the government loves it so much that it is putting your Band in your passport.

Then a weekend software patch shuffles the whole country.

A Surrey magistrate wakes up Yoruba-adjacent. A Lagos skin-lightening tycoon is declared Premium Grade overnight. The Home Secretary is officially Insufficient Data. In Sutton, a family of seven is sorted into five different Bands, and two eight-year-old twins are put in different rooms at school.

Dr Ada Whitlock-Eze is TrueHue’s mixed-race Head of Reference Populations, and her own result has only ever said Other (Pending). Ordered to clean up the mess, she traces the data back to its source. At the bottom of it all is a mahogany box of Victorian paint cards, made in 1884 for a museum of skulls, by a paint merchant who knew it was nonsense. One card is set apart from the rest, with a line ruled underneath it.

The merchant’s name was Ebenezer Whitlock.

What follows is a sacking, a parliamentary hearing, a grandmother in a gold gele asking a registrar to show me where the line goes, and the most dangerous question anyone can ask a form: where did you come from?

The novel is fierce, very funny and rooted in real genetics and colonial history. The Colour Bar Code takes apart the oldest lie on the census, that people come in colours, and shows there is no such thing as white or black. There is only between.

For readers of Americanah, Erasure and The Sellout.