A House for Alice: From the Women’s Prize shortlisted author of Ordinary People

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This book is a series of vignettes of family life in London following the Grenfell Tower fire and during Brexit. Set against the shadows of a city and a country in turmoil, Diana Evans's ordinary people confront fundamental questions. The book has an interesting start tying together the disaster of Grenfall and a fire at the same time in the house of an elderly man who lives alone. The central "crisis" is whether Alice remains in her comfortable life in England or goes to a new house being built for her in Nigeria.

The book opens with the historic 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London that destroyed more than 100 homes and took the lives of 72 people.

And while the focus is then turned to particular people and it becomes somewhat easier to identify some of the characters, I've felt the writing has lost some of the lushness and the over detailed way everything was presented made for a slightly boring read. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. This books portrays how we all have several sides to us and shows us how we pick and choose what we want to show depending on who we’re with.

I thought about times that this book almost read like linked short stories and, whilst some were stronger than others, I really enjoyed the deep dive into the characters lives told through pivotal moments. The book seems to announce that the story’s dramatic tension will be about Alice’s question of whether to leave Britain or not, but this is just its first trick.This novel features some of the same characters from the author's earlier novel, Ordinary People, which is about the breakdown of Melissa and Michael's relationship and their friendship with Damian and Stephanie. I think Evans does a great job painting a picture of each individual’s personal battles—in fact, there’s not a lot of plot here to speak of. While I did like the writing and the character development, I was somewhat disappointed with the way the story flowed.

I loved the emotionally-charged writing and the complicated depictions of relationships (parents, children, siblings, spouses, friends and lovers) in turmoil and conflict (and some few but transcendent moments of joy). Evans’s publishers are being oddly coy about this new novel’s ties to its predecessor, but anyone coming to A House for Alice without first having read Ordinary People will be flummoxed by certain elements, in particular sections depicting a harrowing loss for Damian and his family. Apparently it contains a lot of the same characters and whilst I did manage to read it and have a good understanding of the themes in the book, I do think I would have benefitted from reading Ordinary People.This is a novel with important things to say about the world today, particularly for Black men, It's also a highly enjoyable read with just as much insight into human relationships as Ordinary People and I recommend it. After having a go at reading it, I would say it's going to be a very hard read as a standalone, it must absolutely be marketed as a sequel. Meanwhile, her piano-playing teenage daughter is grappling with what it means to be a young woman, “its performance, its humiliation and restriction”.