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

Product Information

I did think the real-life Grenfell tragedy was well woven in and there is a real and justified political anger here (interesting to reflect on what has changed and hasn't since the opening scene of Ordinary People, set on the night of Obama's election). As the story progresses, we meet Alice’s children and their families and how they cope with the death in their family and Alice’s impending plans to leave – old wounds, resentments, and disappointments rise to the surface and what is left to be seen is whether the family is brought closer or does tragedy and loss tear them further apart. A HOUSE FOR ALICE is an interesting and intimate glimpse into one family’s turmoil on the heels of the sudden loss of a husband and father. It is rare for me to be so deeply moved by a book, a book that puts feelings into words, feelings which I’ve never been able to clearly express myself.

Circling around the wife of the late Cornelius Pitt, we follow her journey to escape her current life to live out her remaining days in Nigeria. The novel is a memorial to the dead of Grenfell who appear throughout the novel, and an invitation to be more conscious, to drag ourselves out of complacency, or complicity. A House for Alice is a very English novel and by that I mean, Diana Evans is re-defining what Englishness is. Diana Evans “Ordinary People” was Women’s Prize shortlisted in 2019 – it was a book where I had mixed feelings, largely due to my lack of identification with main characters who preferred Brixton to Box Hill and considered the death of Michael Jackson an epochal event, and I also struggled with the tell-not-show lengthy description of everyday life. I imagine Paul Hollywood's feedback if she were a contestant on Great British Bake Off: beautiful but needs more flavor.

I got about a quarter of the way through this before I realised, to my delight, it was a sequel to Ordinary People! Her writing is beautiful and because she's so precise she earns the right to daydream for the men, women, children we live alongside as we read, taking us far beyond the day to day, before she delivers them back to London, or the airport, or Paris, the church, to Benin, the therapist or gentrified Peckham, to the cost of housing or the music reverberating through the many rooms of a club night in Croydon. Lke many other reviewers, I hadn't realised that this was a sequel of sorts to 'Ordinary People' and I was delighted when it became apparent partway through. 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.

The Grenfell Tower tragedy frames Diana Evans’s new novel, its opening chapter capturing something of the shock and horror of 72 lives lost to incompetence and malpractice, its closing pages bearing witness to a silent march of remembrance. I liked the political dilemmas the characters faced as Blacks in London – as immigrants, as parents of Black boys, as caregivers to a cantankerous and abusive father, as parents to children with mental health and criminal justice issues, etc.She has been an associate lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her prose is gorgeous and dreamlike, and her characters are fleshed out and real, even the ones whose stories are relatively peripheral. Told from many viewpoints, the novel reads like interconnected short stories and can be a bit hard to follow at times because of the abundance of characters including the members of the Pitt family as well as Melissa's ex-husband, Michael, and his new wife, Nicole, and friends Damian, Stephanie and their family. Adel is dismayed at the thought of Alice leaving London and her children and grandchildren behind to live alone in Nigeria while Carol thinks they should respect their mother's wishes.

In 2017, London’s Grenfell Tower, pictured in the background, caught fire, destroying 100 homes and killing 72 people. A House For Alice didn't have a particularly clear storyline with the actual "house for alice" portion of the story being a fairly miniscule amount, in relation to the rest of the book. Anyway, though, I generally liked this book and think if you’re a fan of Zadie Smith’s works you’ll probably enjoy it since it is extremely character-focused.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. I have so much rage and frustration inside me because of it, and it takes so much energy, to be dodging all the time, downplaying, pretending it’s fine. Each chapter of the novel alternates between different members of the family as they remain divided over their mothers wishes and each face up to their own personal challenges and pain. Her second novel, The Wonder, was also published to critical acclaim, described by The Times as 'the most dazzling depiction of the world of dance since Ballet Shoes'. I think without that knowledge the book can be difficult to follow as characters are introduced with at best incomplete back stories otherwise – as can be seen from a number of other reviews.

That shouldn't be at all off-putting to those who haven't read the earlier novel, the relevant backstory is all contained here so you won't miss anything essential.This doesn't mean that I didn't like any of the characters: Ria, Melissa, and Michael were favorites, while I never liked either Carol or Adel. I put the book down for several days on three separate occasions, reading some interesting novels in between, and frankly, would have abandoned it entirely were it not to be discussed in our book group.