Evans has a light touch when needed, but the comedy in Melissa’s catastrophising advice to her 10-year-old son on how to dodge gang recruiters, for instance, can’t eclipse its inherent sadness. 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. Me duele no darle las 5 estrellas porque me encantaron todas y cada una de las historias entrelazadas pero me habría gustado más que fueran introducidas de manera coherente, pues a veces saltaban de una a otra de manera aleatoria para luego volver a otra y no tenía mucho sentido.

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.I will say that there were so many characters and storylines involved it sometimes became difficult to keep them straight in my head, and it was often a battle to remain focused. Ordinary People won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and also received a nomination for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction. I want to point out that A House For Alice is a follow-up to the authors other book, Ordinary People.

And whilst it was beautifully written, there were fair chunks that I completely skimmed or skipped over as I didn't really feel like they added anything to the part I was reading, nor would I miss anything important if I didn't read them. It is an expansive novel that covers a wide range of themes, the opening chapters connect the death of their father in a fire on the same night as the Grenfell Fire tragedy which as a reader encapsulates an essence of the horror and pain that resonates today and demands what has changed? through the delicacy of her [Evans's] prose, the deftness of her dialogue and the clarity of her observations, she manages to create a novel that measures up to life.At the novel’s center is Alice herself, the Pitt matriarch who, after fifty years in England, now longs to live out her final years in her homeland of Nigeria. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel, the Guardian First Book, the Commonwealth Best First Book and the Times/Southbank Show Breakthrough awards, and nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. 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.

A great work of vivid storytelling for fans of modern fiction that explores social and political issues and their impacts on family and society 4 Stars ✨.The story is set in 2017 and incorporates the real-life tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire in West London in the narrative and explores socio-political themes and topics like immigration, culture and racism.

His wife, the eponymous Alice, immigrated to Britain decades earlier from Nigeria when they married. This is a novel that encourages us to stand in life’s burning doorways, and to think long before we walk away or walk through. am because the baby is awake, and ideally the book will lift me out of the weariness and frustration of those moments, but this one didn’t.Intimately drawn and set against a fraught political backdrop, yet equally full of hope, humor, and humanity, A House for Alice traces the scars of grief and betrayal across generations and uncovers the secrets we keep from those closest to us. Her prose is gorgeous and dreamlike, and her characters are fleshed out and real, even the ones whose stories are relatively peripheral. Set against the shadows of a city and a country in turmoil, Diana Evans's ordinary people confront fundamental questions. Her three daughters are divided on whether she stays or goes, and tasked with realising her dream of a house in Nigeria, conflict stirs and old wounds rise to the surface. Another aspect of the book that I wasn't too sure whether I felt okay about it or not was the references to Grenfell.