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

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The book’s eponymous matriarch has a habit of coming to a standstill while conversing with her friend on the stroll back from church: “forwardness occasionally distracted”, she and Evans both seem to find. A House for Alice is a story told in lyrical prose of love, loss, and the loneliness of people struggling to find a home/a place where they belong. A House for Alice touches on so many themes: a dysfunctional family and family trauma, the challenges of marriage and its failure, racism, the refugee experience, the love for a child, failing a child, failing oneself, the view from old age.

Evans' style is sophisticated and the emotional geography of her novel is complex - without realising, as I read I was drawn into this family's quirks, bickering, wrong turns, kindnesses and tragedies and I might have been chatting with friends it was so real, recognisable. It includes complicated familial and romantic relationships, racism, and political and social issues with the Grenfell tragedy and other current events such as Harry and Meghan's wedding, Brexit and Boris Johnson's blundering in the background. 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. The story focuses on Melissa, the youngest sister, and her relationships with her ex-husband, Michael, and children.

With her grown children torn about whether they should allow her to go, they feel threatened as the family dynamic might crumble to pieces.

There are several characters we need to keep track of, and it is often difficult to keep note of how they are related to one another.Perhaps her death, as well as her life, would be a disagreement of place, and once you have left you can never really go back.

She has been an associate lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Sprawling but always engaging, the novel’s cast is filled with rounded individuals, their problems and options as Black, middle-class Londoners showcased at work and play and contemplation, with humor and empathy. 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 ( https://www.She dedicates the book to her own Nigerian mother and “all of us who have found ourselves in a strange land”. Honestly, if the author was more clear with whose perspective we were in and how the characters in the scene related to each other and Alice/Alice's daughters, I would have likely given it a whole star more. and for that matter they were not particularly impressed with the Queen either for the fact that the flag was not flying at half-mast as it would be if these were lots of British-born white people dying, and for her elitist, unerring disassociation from the politics of her country and the ordinary lives of its citizens whose taxes and historic colonial exploitation helped fund her luxury. 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.

Meanwhile, her piano-playing teenage daughter is grappling with what it means to be a young woman, “its performance, its humiliation and restriction”. The three sisters have a close yet strained relationship as they try to manage their own complicated lives as well as deciding how to help their mother, Alice, enter the next phase of her life. Another aspect of the book that I wasn't too sure whether I felt okay about it or not was the references to Grenfell. But after this initial pages it descended in name throwing with pretty much no way to learn who is who and how all this characters were connected. Cornelius Pitt, a man in his '90s, dies alone in a fire sparked by a cigarette left burning in an ashtray in his home the same night that 72 people die in a fire at Grenfell Tower apartments.Alice was thinking about her own next world and her own castle, which was not in Kingsbury or in Kilburn. Past that, there was too much going on but also nothing really happening for a lot of this, and then there was a random sketch put in that I still can’t make sense of. Nicole is a lovely counterbalance - driven to live knowing ‘if you don’t dance in the light you will sink beneath the sand and die’. 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.