Her fourth novel, A House for Alice, is the highly acclaimed follow-up, for which she was again shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. By turning tragedy into something beautiful in the first chapter, I knew this was a novel I wouldn’t be able to put down easily. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel, the Guardian First Book, the Commonwealth Best First Book and the Times/South Bank Show Breakthrough awards, and longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. With her grown children torn about whether they should allow her to go, they feel threatened as the family dynamic might crumble to pieces.

A fire in a high-rise residential apartment in West London on the same night left several residents homeless and many dead. 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. 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.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. Instead, it settles into something more nebulous – a shifting mosaic of intergenerational becoming and belonging that affords glimpses of poetry slams, Croydon nightclubs and the afterlife.

In 2017, London’s Grenfell Tower, pictured in the background, caught fire, destroying 100 homes and killing 72 people. Diana Evans is fast proving herself a novelist to rank alongside Anne Tyler, so adept is she at parsing life's longings and upheavals. It also examines the impact of family legacy and connection, parenting, grief, mental health, love, sacrifice, politics, racism and prejudice. Alice's longing for her homeland and her desire to spend her final years in Benin adds a poignant layer to the narrative.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. ARC // I have a lot of thoughts about this book - both good and bad - so I'm going to try and be a coherent as possible with this review. 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. The chapter describing the morning divorced parents take their son to the hospital for surgery was so beautiful, so real, the experience transforming for the parents. Makes me think of a Brueghel painting with many individuals going about their business in a London that is at times on fire.

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. 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. 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.

Why would no one share or it not be heavily stated that this is a second body of work featuring these characters! Characters from that earlier novel make appearances here, but there is no need to have read that previous title to enjoy this new one. I loved musical diva Nicole and how Hazel's comments about Ed Sheeran and Beyonce made me laugh out loud. Yet he still wonders if he will ever know anyone the way he knew Melissa, and she in turn is nostalgic for their once safe haven.

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?I did find the sections focused on the characters I already knew, such as Michael, Melissa and Damian, plus that of their close connections, to be much more compelling than the sections dealing with Cornelius and Alice so, as a result, the novel took a while to get going for me (I was probably a quarter of the way through before I really became captivated). I got about a quarter of the way through this before I realised, to my delight, it was a sequel to Ordinary People. Did any of them not see the sheer ugliness and parasitism of the monarchy as a reason not to feel enthusiasm? 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. 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.