A House for Alice by Diana Evans is a brilliantly written book. She uses a stunning lyrical prose to create memorable characters. I thoroughly enjoyed immersing myself in these characters' worlds.
The writing is remarkably evocative, skillfully captivating and straight up engaging.
A sweeping and captivating story from the very beginning.

"I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own."

Thank You NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for your generosity and gifting me a copy of this amazing eARC!

Unfortunately this book did not captivate me at all, I just learned through reading reviews that it is part of a series which I did not realize. It was a essentially a family drama that began when the father died in a house fire which was the house where they all grew up. No one was living there anymore except him because the children are grown and Alice, his wife had moved out years ago. Alice dreams of a home in her home country where she can live out her years.

I can’t say too much about the plot because I’m sure what it was. The book meanders into too many characters’ stories and I found myself skimming much just to finish. While I feel that the ultimate theme is that none of the children nor Alice found that house to be a home and left them all somewhat lost, I found that the story got lost in the telling of their story. While the ending was a little interesting I didn’t enjoy the journey to get there.

2.5 stars

Thank you to NetGalley and Pantheon for the ARC for review

Yes this is a sequel of sorts to Ordinary People but only because it plays off several of the characters, notably Melissa . This is the story of a family, of a longing for home, of dissatisfaction. It pings between the characters and all over the place. I wanted very much to like it but it was a challenge. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. It's not a pretty or happy story but it's a thoughtful one.

Beautiful cover,so well written characters that drew me in to their lives their family.Didn’t realize it was a series but will now go back and read the first.A book that left me with a lot to think about.#netgalley #ahouseforalice.

A challenging book that discusses the difficulties women go through in the patriarch and the way to break the cycle.

First off, I'm obsessed with the cover of this book! It's so beautiful and fit's perfectly with the contents of the story. I also truly loved the character development and relationship between them. I didn't read the first book in this series, I didn't know this was a sequel so the beginning felt a little rushed and I was left trying to piece a few things together. But once I did, I really loved it.

Thank you, NetGalley and Pantheon Books for allowing me to review this book.

A House for Alice by Diana Evans was a beautifully written novel about what it means to live in a country founded off of the oppression of your peoples. The novel opens with two fires - the house fire that led to the death of white patriarch Cornelius Pitt and the fire of Grenfell Tower which led to the deaths of over 70 residents, none of who received proper justice. Alice, Cornelius's estranged wife, has spent years living in diaspora, preserving her own culture in a foreign country and longing to be laid to rest at home in Nigeria. The novel follows Alice's journey home in addition to the lives of her daughters Melissa, Carol, and Adel and others close to them. The primary subjects of this novel include diaspora, systemic oppression, colonialism, grief, family, and healing.

While the prose of the novel was stunning, the many changes in point of view and introduction of different characters was a bit disorienting. In addition, it was hard to grasp a sense of time throughout the novel, as time skips were common but not explicitly described. Only after about halfway through the novel did I feel a confident grasp on each of the different characters, their storylines, and how to track shifts in perspective. I do feel that this book had a lot of brilliant insights, but at least at the beginning, I could have grasped them better if these different shifts were easier to follow.

In terms of what I loved, Evans did a masterful job of using food as a way to describe the values of each of the characters. The contrast between Cornelius's pork pie, Alice's akara, and Carol's veganism gave the reader a great sense of each individual through the use of artful, creative description. Alice, Melissa, and Michael were all standout characters as well - Alice's deep sense of feeling ungrounded, Melissa's complicated experience of trauma and desire to heal, and Michael's profound sense of oppression provided fantastic lines that broadened my own perspectives of the intergenerational effects of colonialism.

In all, being an American, while the nuances of British politics were relatively foreign to me - this book broadened and deepened my understanding of how colonialism impacts modern day societies, specifically in countries that were founded off of oppression and conquering. Diana Evans delivers stunning lines and paragraphs that make the reader feel deeply attuned to each of her characters and the different struggles that they all face. I love novels that inhabit my mind to broaden my understanding of the world and the lives of different individuals, and Diana Evans succeeded in this aspect.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Pantheon Books for the opportunity to read this digital advanced reader copy.

I received this from Netgalley.com.

A very slow moving and less than captivating Read. While reading other reviews, this is apparently a series. Maybe that added to the confusion and messiness of the story.

2☆

I feel that the synopsis of this book wasn't very accurate. 1) This is a sequel, and it doesn't mention it in the listing. Ordinarily, I wouldn't mind picking up the second book without reading the first, but I think the backstory on some of these characters is important, and the author doesn't rehash any of it. She basically plops you in and doesn't say who anyone is other than Cornelius, Alice and their daughters and the grandkids. That would be fine if they were the only characters, but there are a lot of additional characters. 2) Figuring out the housing situation for Alice is only about 20% - 25% of the novel. I thought it would be the main plotline, given the title and the synopsis. No, we spend plenty of time at the dance club with ... refer to my problem #1.

Individual scenes were actually quite good, but I would have appreciated more setting up of scenes. Who are these people and how do they know each other? Another annoyance is that we'd be two pages into a new chapter with only "she" mentioned before we were told whose perspective we were in. Honestly, if the author was more clear with whose perspective we were in and how the characters in the scene related to each other and Alice/Alice's daughters, I would have likely given it a whole star more.

I didn't know about the Grenfell incident before reading this novel. I would to have liked to know more, but I had to go to Wikipedia to alleviate my confusion. It felt like a number of things were mentioned and then dropped, so the novel felt rather scattered and choppy.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The novel opens up with two tragedies that happen simultaneously. One involves the death of the Pitt family patriarch, estranged from his family, and the fire that destroys a residential London high-rise leaving many for dead.

Circling around the wife of the late Cornelius Pitt, we follow her journey to escape her current life to live out her remaining days in Nigeria. With her grown children torn about whether they should allow her to go, they feel threatened as the family dynamic might crumble to pieces.

This novel reads like a poem. By turning tragedy into something beautiful in the first chapter, I knew this was a novel I wouldn’t be able to put down easily.

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.

Overall a beautifully written book. Sometimes a bit dreary, but the hopefulness always shone through at the right moments—perfect novel for people that enjoy family life fiction.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to #KnopfPantheonVintageandAnchor #PantheornBooks #NetGalley and #DianaEvans for the ARC of #AHouseforAlice. I will admit something I don’t say often, but although this book was beautifully written, almost poetical at times, I did not truly care about this family. I always felt like I was missing something, an inside storyline or something to make me like them. There were so many characters that at one point I considered making a chart to keep everyone straight. As a child of immigrants, I totally understood the yearning for the motherland – Nigeria, in this case. This novel is a snapshot of a family, warts and all, that is both charming and infuriating at the same time. It’s a beautifully written novel with vivid, dynamic characters. It wasn’t my cuppa, but it was a nice enough read.

I fell deeply into the family story Diana Evans created in A House for Alice. The Grenfell Tower fire is the center around which stories of loss rebound and the offspring of Cornelius and Alice unfold. The aging couple is from Nigeria but has lived in England for fifty years. Alice loves her three daughters but insists she wants to spend her final years in a house in Benin, a place she has never stopped missing.

I was mesmerized by the complex emotions of each of the characters. Melissa and Michael were particularly intriguing in their push/pull relationship over many years. All the victories and defeats of this family symbolize the disparity of life in England, where the class system and racism seem to be fully alive and keep people down. The investigation into the Grenfell fire appears to be ongoing. The struggle for people of color goes on as well. I recommend this book to everyone!

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the advanced copy of the book to be published on September 12, 2023.

The writing in this book is gorgeous, and the relationships between the characters are great from what I can tell, but the real issue is that this is a sequel for another book and not marked or indicated as such. As a result, a lot of character (around ten) are introduced all at once with no real explanation of who they are or how they are related, and it makes the reading experience extremely complicated and difficult to follow.