Five years on from her acclaimed novel Ordinary People, the writer returns to explore the lives of black British Londoners. She talks about Grenfell, belonging – and how she writes to bear witness
In 2019, Diana Evans’s third novel Ordinary People met with a rapturous critical response, was shortlisted for the Women’s prize, and earned comparisons to Tolstoy from the New Yorker, due to her gift for intertwining “the public and the private, the momentous and the mundane”. Since her debut, 26A, was published in 2005, her novels have been a record of our times, offering elegant yet excoriating observations of London life through the intimate lens of domestic relationships.
Her fiction takes aim at the intersection of love and politics. Her characters come alive by how they experience, observe and react to current events. This in turn influences how they love and are loved. The political becomes part of the pain of ordinary life. It is a project she continues in her latest novel, A House for Alice, the follow-up to Ordinary People, which continues the story of two long-term couples – Melissa and Michael, and Damian and Stephanie. When we speak, she explains that she was drawn back to the characters by a visceral connection: “I genuinely believed in Michael and Melissa’s love story but there’s so much in their way – psychologically, societally – and I wanted to pick that apart a bit more.”
