Relationships in all their forms are played out in this story - through family, love, work and community - and all have a relateable ring of truth about them. Being set in a current social setting adds to the authenticity. Not always uplifting, but the end finally gives meaning to the circle of life.

An outstanding novel by the talented but underrated writer Diane Evans. I expect to see A House for Alice on the Booker or Women’s Prize shortlist this year. Painfully flawed characters in a story of family relationships, breakdowns and mental health crises. Gorgeous, moving writing. Highly recommended.

Alice is a beloved matriarch, wishing to spend her last days in the land of her birth, who faces her children divided between the thought of her leaving and staying in London. Diana Evans, the author of ORDINARY PEOPLE, captivates readers in this intimate and compelling novel, A HOUSE FOR ALICE.

The author entwines an insightful look into Alice's struggle, with each of her children fighting personal battles that reveal deeply personal secrets and demonstrate the power of unconditional love. From the oldest daughter, Lucy, who learns to trust again, to the middle daughter, Melissa, trying to recover from a broken heart, and the youngest, Michael, faced with imperfection in the wake of his father's death, each character demonstrates individual strength and understanding of their place in the family unit.

Set in a backdrop of social unrest and against the urban skyline, this page-turning tale invites readers to explore the underlying dynamics of parenting and family love and consider the most profound of questions: how do we fulfill our true selves when everything is on the line? An engaging, thought-provoking novel, A HOUSE FOR ALICE is a brilliant look at family life, making Diana Evans an even greater authority on ORDINARY PEOPLE.

If I’m remembering correctly I really enjoyed Ordinary People, so I was disappointed to find that I just could not engage with the narrative of this novel, with the changes in point of view and the seemingly random moves in and out of memory. I didn’t finish it, but I didn’t really give it a fair go either.

Life is complicated, disappointing, sad, beautiful.

I come to A House For Alice as a big fan of Ordinary People. This is important, I think, for readers deciding whether A House For Alice is for them.

A House For Alice picks up 8 years after Ordinary People. We are reunited with Melissa and her family, Michael and his new wife Nicole, former friend Damian and his family.

Evans provides the reader with a window into the lives of ordinary people, and makes the bold decision to follow strands of each characters’ life. The story does not play out in a straightforward manner: there is no single protagonist; we pick up parts of each characters’ story at different times; we miss parts of the action. This feels more true to reality and how we see the people around us - everyone has their own story, we only know what they are willing to show us.

Evans’ affection for and deep knowledge of London, in particular Crystal Palace and Gipsy Hill, made for a carefully observed, beautifully rendered backdrop. Of the area she writes: ‘… the sky was Eiffels wrapped in reams of night.’ I will now forever think of this when I see those transmission towers.

At the same time, the novel struggles with frustration, upset, bafflement with modern England. It is a political novel, it asks us to think about these events - what has been done? How can this be?

I can understand some readers might feel the novel tenuously ties current events to the plot. Evans’ characters reflect on Grenfell Tower fire, the Windrush scandal, the proroguing of Parliament, Brexit, stop and search, amongst others. I think it is hard to speak to the lives of regular people without the context of these events, but fully appreciate that it can feel minimising, like the tragedies of some lives are the backdrop to the lives of others. It will be for each reader to form their own view on how well Evans executed their inclusion.

I look forward to this novel being out in the world and talking about it with people.

Pick up this book up if: you are a fan of the messy lives of ordinary people, particularly for fans of Ordinary People.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I'll confess: I got very slightly confused by Evans's fairly large cast of characters here, and the way she swings between different narratives. But she maintains her usual high standards, and it's well worth reading.

Diane Evans has a chatty style of story telling.
This book is about Alice, her family and friends of the family.
Like most authors nowadays there is frequent switching from one bunch of people to another, this always makes it more difficult to read, but the reader must accept that modern books aren't written to make life easy for the reader.
The characters are lively, the storyline interesting, overall an excellent read.
My thanks to the publisher for an advanced copy for honest review.

Loved, loved, loved this book! Diana Evans’ writing gets better and better. Set against the backdrop of the Grenfell tragedy ‘A House for Alice’ tells the story of one extended family and their relationships with each other. Evans has an eye for the minutiae of family life and this novel is especially fine tuned.

Diana Evans has a brilliant turn of phrase and often makes me think about issues in a new way. This latest novel is no exception, although I felt that some of the plot lacked pace and some of the political analysis was too simplistic.

SUGGESTION TO PUBLISHER: I would suggest making it clearer in the blurb that this is a follow up to "Ordinary People" featuring the same main characters but 8 years later. Without that I think the book can be I think difficult to follow as characters are introduced with at best incomplete back stories otherwise – as can be seen from a number of other reviews here.

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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. On the other hand the music embedded throughout the novel (this was a novel very much with its own soundtrack) and there was some brilliant observational writing on coupledom or parenthood.

And I think it is crucial to make clear, which the blurb to me completely fails to do, that this is a direct follow up to “Ordinary People” – revisiting the same group of characters 8 years further on.

Whereas “Ordinary People” began with a moment of hope – and with a party attended by Michael and Melissa to celebrate the momentous election of Barack Obama, this novel begins on a note of horror – opening on the very day of the Grenfell Tower fire. And the contrast is I think even more deliberate and bought out in a number of ways: Michael (a key protagonist in both stories and now a committed social justice campaigner) takes time to reflect on the failed promises of the Obama-election; earlier, when his second wife – Nicole, a once famous singer – throws a party to celebrate Meghan marrying into the Royal Family, Michael is more focused on the contrast with growing homelessness; and the only newly inaugurated administration in this book is Theresa May’s government and her early mishandling of the Grenfell Tower crisis as well as the implicit (if not explicit) message that Britain is no longer welcoming to those born elsewhere.

“A House for Alice” is at heart about the quest of the ageing matriarch Alice – mother of Melissa, her two older sisters Adel and Carol and estranged wife of their father Cornelius – to move back to Nigeria where, slowly, a house is being built for her.

The book opens, alongside the Grenfell Tower fire, with another fatal fire on the same evening – Cornelius, living on his own and increasingly suffering from dementia, falls asleep and his lit cigarette causes his death. I must admit I was not very convinced about this juxtaposition as a literary device – it felt at best melodramatic/coincidental, at worse in poor taste and I was also not that convinced about the appropriateness of the treatment of Cornelius’s memory loss.

From there in the first part we circle around the lives of Melissa (and her tendency to date slightly abusive men), Michael and Nicole (whose marriage seems to be floundering on incompatibility, but one so strong that I was less clear on why they really ended up together in the first place), Alice (and the small church of which she is part) – and some of their wider family.

The first part ends on what, for those unfamiliar with Diana Evans and her literary trait of always adding a slightly supernatural/ghost like element to all her novels – something which stems from the tragic loss of her own twin sister – could seem an odd note, as we suddenly join Cornelius seemingly being turned away from heaven (Cornelius’s behaviour on earth, particularly towards his daughters, and the long term impact of it on their lives and relationships is a key dynamic to the novel’s later development).

We then switch to what can seem, and I think would to someone coming to the novel cold, to be a almost entirely separate plot line – where we join the other male protagonist of “Ordinary People” – the Dorking-hating Damian is in Paris searching for his daughter Avril. Avril, whose first panic attack was a key scene in the first novel, suffers from continuing mental issues and Damien’s rather self-centred decision to leave home (and move to the wilds of Merstham) to find himself has not contributed positively to that – even when found she suffers from severe eating disorders.

And from there we return to Melissa and Michael, and at times Damian and Stephanie, as well as to Alice’s continual desire to return to Africa which itself increases and brings out the tensions between her three daughters, particularly when a trip to Africa shows that the house project is much less advanced than expected.

As someone who perhaps admired “Ordinary People” but did not really enjoy the characters at all, it is perhaps not surprising that this sequel did not really work for me. And my enjoyment was not assisted by what I often felt to be over-writing (particularly of some rather odd sex scenes) and by rather too many rather extraneous scenes (a trip to Portugal, a camping trip to Sussex, a starring role in a Panto) and additional characters. I did enjoy a scene where Michael and Damian almost meet, but Damian pretends not to have seen him but generally was not really engaged by the novel.

Overall I think a book for, but only for, fans of “Ordinary People”.

I was expecting more from this one than I read. I didn’t enjoy the narration wasn’t too keen on the main character m.

This was a disappointing read that started out well. Alice wants to move back to Nigeria. As more and more characters enter the fray it all started to get rather confusing. I didn’t know where the book was going or why.

Thanks to Netgallery for the ARC

This book has many strands running through it, some of which seemed to disappear inexplicably, as if there is actually more than one book to be written.
The start, with the Grenfell fire and the domestic fire introduced a wealth of characters, complex emotional situations and interesting cultural and political commentary but were soon subsumed by other characters and story lines coming to the forefront.
The Alice of the title want to move home to Nigeria to see out the remainder of her life and her daughters are variously helping and hindering that effort. but the story jumps around in a fairly confusing way and I found it difficult to follow at times.
Perhaps it reads in the way a family really runs, with random interactions and complex events running concurrently and confusing all outsiders (and no doubt some family members too) but for me as a reader it was too disparate and the characters I really enjoyed were lost in the sheer volume of happenings.

Sadly I didn't connect with this book. The beginning was good and the dilemmas that people face looking after elderly relatives well articulated but I found my attention wandering . Grenfell is just incidental and not pivotal to the plot which is not what I expected.
Maybe I need to read this book again in a little while. It has that feel. At the moment I just feel very disconnected

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. We discover his family and their interconnected parts. Alice his Nigerian wife, who is separated from him, and who craves to return to Nigeria to complete her circle of life and her three daughters and their families. This is a book about love, life, interconnectedness, marriage, childhood and so many more relationships. it is told sympathetically from so many angles including race and politics. I loved the book and I definitely did not want it to end as I was enjoying it so much! The characters were drawn sensitively with all their successes and failures. I highly recommend it and it certainly made an impression on me.

Oh dear. It started off really well - the twin events of the Grenfell fire and a domestic fire was an intriguing start. I hoped that there would be more on how these events affected on characters and their environments. However things suddenly took a turn for the bizarre, including a brief sketch involving a man trying to get into heaven.

I don’t know if it was confusing or I just couldn’t get into the book, but the mass of characters and their connections baffled me to the point that I just didn’t care. At this point I gave up.

I got about a quarter of the way through this before I realised, to my delight, it was a sequel to Ordinary People. Even if it wasn't, though, I was hooked. After a mysterious, leisurely beginning, Evans drops us straight into Grenfell. Khadija Saye and Mary Mendy, among others, haunt these pages as two or three warring families try to find their way back to happiness.

I loved new character Nicole and the comments about Ed Sheeran and Beyonce made me laugh out loud. I also loved how an older gentleman in a suit at a dance is described as 'dapper like a Linton!' (I always felt rather sorry for Stephanie, who is portrayed in the first book as slightly basic, and I really feel sorry for her now. Two thirds of the way through something so awful happens I nearly stopped reading. However, it was so good I picked the book up shortly again afterwards).

Once again, Evans takes us through the weird and unloved parts of London and its borders (Catford, Gipsy Hill, Merstham) though this time the vista broadens to Nigeria, as Alice, a woman nearing the end of her life (but not quite there yet) makes preparations to go home. But what is home? What is a house? What is a marriage? Who are we, and how much is that shaped by the needs and wants of the people we love?

Evans is unafraid to face these questions, and while I wouldn't go so far as to say the book argues for the existence of ghosts or an afterlife, there are a couple of hints that, while some things stay lost forever, some can also be found.