A HOUSE FOR ALICE

The shifting sands of relationships, time, and place frame a vibrant new novel from an award-winning British writer.

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. Readers of her preceding work, Ordinary People (2018), will be familiar with its two central couples—Melissa and Michael and Stephanie and Damian—but years have passed, their relationships have shifted, the lens has widened, and new readers can start here. Now the focus includes Melissa’s two sisters and, notably, her mother, Alice, while the couples’ relationships have buckled. In a virtuoso opening chapter, Alice’s husband, Cornelius, from whom she is separated, meets an unfortunate end, freeing Alice to plan a return to her homeland, Nigeria. The timing and circumstances of Cornelius’ death coincide with the Grenfell Tower fire, the horrific London apartment house blaze that killed 72 people in 2017 and raised multiple issues of negligence, poverty, race, and responsibility. Evans weaves recent politics and social issues—“the doomful cloud of Boris Johnson, the underlying permanence of British racism”—into the narrative as she explores the two former couples’ new, more separate, often restless existences, still connected by their children. There’s Melissa’s debatable new relationship, Michael’s second marriage to a gregarious singer, Damian’s mental health struggle, and much more. Caretaking, of elders and children, is a theme that resonates at many levels, a role not always performed successfully. The notion of home, actual and symbolic, dominates: “More than simply land, but the threads you have spun in your life, the ties you have made with your blood and company.” 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.

A baggy, striking, perceptive slice of intergenerational life.