I loved musical diva Nicole and how Hazel's comments about Ed Sheeran and Beyonce made me laugh out loud. The novel delves into the tragic loss of Cornelius Winston Pit in a fire at Grenfall Tower, where many residents, including him, lost their lives. 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. Sometimes a bit dreary, but the hopefulness always shone through at the right moments—perfect novel for people that enjoy family life fiction. 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.

As the investigation into the tragedy unfolds, it becomes clear that the struggle for justice and equality for people of color is ongoing. With rich characters and a particular dynamic only families have with each other, I found myself engrossed in their decisions following their father’s death. I really appreciated seeing an in-depth portrait of a family that is simultaneously unraveling at the seams and continually there for each other; they are constantly at each other’s throats but they’re never far from each other.It’s a real canvas with those in the foreground - particularly Melissa, Michael and Nicole, worked up more - which is fine. There are references to current affairs too – the Windrush scandal, Harry and Meghan’s wedding, the “doomful cloud of Boris Johnson”. Broad in range, vivid in detail, alight often with eloquent language, Evans’ fourth novel, set among a Black community in London, takes time to reveal itself. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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 (as an aside the author’s debut novel starts with Charles and Di’s wedding), 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.

I did enjoy a scene where Michael and Damian almost meet but Damian pretends not to have seen him - however generally I was not really engaged by the novel. 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. Her prose is gorgeous and dreamlike, and her characters are fleshed out and real, even the ones whose stories are relatively peripheral. I loved Diana Evans' use of language in A House for Alice, her use of adjectives to communicate the complicated nature of feelings: "he’d thought it pretentious, earnest, western, sanctimonious, selfish, self-important, impractical, pseudo-buddhist and yogic, but now he could see her logic" (p. It's a shame as I think the opening mischaracterises the general thrust of the novel and might be off-putting to some readers.

Turns out this is due to A House for Alice being a sequel to Evans's debut, fact that is not clear at all. Alice's longing for her homeland and her desire to spend her final years in Benin adds a poignant layer to the narrative. Her essays and journalism appear in among others Time Magazine, Vogue, The Independent, The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Review of Books and Harper’s Bazaar. 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.