‘Diana Evans is one of this country’s best contemporary novelists. In A House for Alice, she tells the story of a family and a city, of loss and belonging, of youth and age, of the uneasy truces we make with the past and the people we used to want to be. I adored it. Her writing is exquisite: every sentence a jewel; every paragraph containing some insight that makes you draw breath with its rightness. I’m so, so grateful to live in an age when Diana Evans writes books’
Elizabeth Day
‘A gorgeous novel from one of our most outstanding writers to be savoured for its beautiful language and profound insights into families, relationships and life in contemporary Britain’
Bernardine Evaristo
‘Evans’s writing stuns… 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’
The New York Times
‘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’
‘Through the delicacy of her prose, the deftness of her dialogue and the clarity of her observations, she manages to create a novel that measures up to life: a novel filled with sorrow, yes, but one that recognises the joy and abundance of the here and now’
The Times Literary Supplement
‘The pages are full of plush sentences. Few writers describe with such inventiveness, eloquence and thoroughness, even in the most seemingly mundane situations’
Michael Donkor, The Observer
‘Evans’s writing is indeed strong: subtle but grounded, lyrical yet accessible’
The Times
‘Diana Evans’s writing is so singular, so arresting, characterful, and so beautiful. A House for Alice is all of those things, and more. Evans is always, always on the finest of forms’
Candice Carty-Williams
‘A shifting mosaic of intergenerational becoming and belonging that affords glimpses of poetry slams, Croydon nightclubs and the afterlife’
The Guardian
‘One of the most interesting things about her writing…is its streak of intuitive, supernatural oddity’
The Sunday Times
‘Evans is a profoundly important chronicler of our times. Her velveteen prose is utterly precise, so detailed and artful: I was tearful by page 12. She’s at the top of her game. It is terribly important that you read this elegy to Grenfell and to our humanity’
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
‘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
‘A poignant and elegant unfurling of the intricacies of family life – sensitively observed and beautifully written’
Nicola Rollock, author of The Racial Code
‘A House For Alice is a sharp appraisal of loss. Evans writes deftly about the shifting intimacies between family‘
Raven Leilani
‘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