'Heart and humour in abundance... exquisite' The Times

After fifty years in London, Alice wants to live out her days in the land of her birth. Her children are divided on whether she stays or goes, and in the wake of their father's death, the imagined stability of the family begins to fray.

Meanwhile youngest daughter Melissa has never let go of a love she lost, and Michael in return, now married to Nicole, is haunted by the failed perfection of the past. As Alice's final decision draws closer, all that is hidden between them rises to the surface . . .

Set against the shadows of a city and a country in turmoil, Diana Evans's ordinary people confront fundamental questions. How should we raise our children? How to do right by our parents? And how, in the midst of everything, can we satisfy ourselves?

'A gorgeous novel from one of our most outstanding writers' Bernardine Evaristo
'Diana Evans is fast proving herself a novelist to rank alongside Anne Tyler' Daily Mail
'A warm but devastating narrative... Like any Evans novel, it is unputdownable' Harper's Bazaar
A New York Times *100 Notable Books of 2023*
Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
Selected in Best Reads of 2023 by The Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, Harper's Bazaar, New Statesman and Good Housekeeping
A Waterstones Book of the Year
The Bookseller Editor's Choice
The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Starred Kirkus Review
Guardian Book of the Day

About the Author

Diana Evans is the author of four novels, including 26a, The Wonder and Ordinary People. She has received award nominations for the Whitbread First Novel, the Guardian First Book, the Commonwealth Best First Book and the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction, and was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. 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, for which A House for Alice was also a finalist. Her journalism appears in Time magazine, the Guardian, Vogue and the Financial Times and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in London.


www.diana-evans.com

Reviews
Evans's writing is...subtle but grounded, lyrical yet accessible. Her characters feel real, their interactions - particularly that tense space where the political and domestic meet - nuanced * Sunday Times *
[An] ambitious tale of a family in contemporary London... [Evans's] wide cast of women are deftly drawn. There's heart and humour in abundance * The Times *
The sheer vitality of Evans's dynamic prose... renders almost hypnotic her constant toggling between the prosaic and the metaphysical. There are some deft set pieces too, dramatising intimacy's most finely nuanced dynamics * Guardian *
A warm but devastating narrative, dealing with the fallout of the Grenfell tragedy... Like any Evans novel, it is unputdownable * Harper's Bazaar, *Books to Look Out For 2023* *
One of our most outstanding writers . . . A House for Alice [is] a stunning multi-generational kaleidoscope of London . . . Evans writes with exceptional profundity and is exemplary at exploring the inner workings of her fictional characters through a prose style so poetic you want to languish in her sentences. * Bernardine Evaristo, Vogue *
A wise, tender novel about family and love that explores the tension between duty and desire and the question of what 'home' really means * Monica Ali, author of Brick Lane and Love Marriage *
I adored it. Her writing is exquisite: every sentence a jewel; every paragraph containing some insight that makes you draw breath with its rightness * Elizabeth Day, author of How To Fail and Magpie *
At every point, whether sad or funny, A House for Alice is compassionate and sharp * Telegraph *
Ambitious in scope ... The story is engrossing and moving * Independent *
Diana Evans is fast proving herself a novelist to rank alongside Anne Tyler, so adept is she at parsing life's longings and upheavals... highly enjoyable, tenderly wrought * Daily Mail *
This intimate, melodic novel explores notions of home, family and long-held secrets * Mail on Sunday *
A House For Alice is a sharp appraisal of loss. Evans writes deftly about the shifting intimacies between family * Raven Leilani, author of Luster *
All is conjured with Evans's keen eye for human behaviour... Her prose is distinguished by its lively, lyrical energy, by its seemingly effortless expansiveness, and by masterful turns of phrase * Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton *
'Diana Evans's writing is so singular, so arresting, characterful, and so beautiful . . . Evans is always, always on the finest of forms' * Candice Carty-Williams, author of Queenie and People Person *
Mesmerising... Few writers describe with such inventiveness, eloquence and thoroughness, even in the most seemingly mundane situations. * Michael Donkor *
This is a knowingly and at times devastatingly elegiac novel... 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... A House for Alice...marks itself out as that rare thing: a sequel that feels necessary * Times Literary Supplement *
Evans is a profoundly important chronicler of our times. Her velveteen prose is utterly precise, so detailed and artful . . . A writer at the top of her game * Leone Ross *
Superb. A deeply enriching and profound novel. Diana Evans is one of our greatest writers. We're so lucky to have her * Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch *
'A poignant and elegant unfurling of the intricacies of family life - sensitively observed and beautifully written' * Nicola Rollock, author of The Racial Code *
An orchestral, richly textured portrait of interconnected middle-class Black lives in contemporary London . . . Witty, poignant and emotionally acute * The Bookseller *
A state-of-the-nation masterpiece... This is rich, multi-layered novel of interconnected lives... another rich, detailed portrait of not-so-ordinary people * Harper's Bazaar *
Beautifully conceived, A House for Alice is a luminous, big-hearted novel about the people and things that enable us to find, keep and call somewhere a home * Financial Times *
A rich evocation of south London, a poignant account of a dwindling marriage and a lovely celebration of music * Guardian *
An impressive sequel to 2018's Ordinary People * Financial Times, *Summer Reads of 2023* *
[A] tender yet political tale * Guardian, *Summer Reads of 2023* *
Lyrical and excoriating * Guardian, *Books of the Year* *



Book Information
ISBN 9781784744267
Author Diana Evans
Format Hardback
Page Count 352
Imprint Chatto & Windus
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 556g
Dimensions(mm) 241mm * 162mm * 31mm