I loved Diana Evans' use of language in A House for Alice, her use of adjectives to communicate the complicated nature of feelings: "he’d thought it pretentious, earnest, western, sanctimonious, selfish, self-important, impractical, pseudo-buddhist and yogic, but now he could see her logic" (p. At once associative, poetic – florid on occasion – but girded by inquisitive precision, it renders almost hypnotic her constant toggling between the prosaic and the metaphysical. Nicole is a lovely counterbalance - driven to live knowing ‘if you don’t dance in the light you will sink beneath the sand and die’. It serves as a reminder that despite progress, there is still much work to be done in dismantling systemic inequalities. Told from many viewpoints, the novel reads like interconnected short stories and can be a bit hard to follow at times because of the abundance of characters including the members of the Pitt family as well as Melissa's ex-husband, Michael, and his new wife, Nicole, and friends Damian, Stephanie and their family.

Past that, there was too much going on but also nothing really happening for a lot of this, and then there was a random sketch put in that I still can’t make sense of. I always felt rather sorry for Stephanie, who is portrayed in the first book as slightly basic, and I really feel sorry for her now.

Another aspect of the book that I wasn't too sure whether I felt okay about it or not was the references to Grenfell. I also found the short segment on Cornelius’ afterlife experience a tad disjointed with the overall narrative. A House for Alice is a book that resonates deeply, shedding light on the enduring struggles faced by marginalized communities. Evans glimpses something heroic in her middle-aged characters as they summon the wherewithal to square fading dreams with reality, but she imbues seventysomething Alice with fierce determination.

It felt like a number of things were mentioned and then dropped, so the novel felt rather scattered and choppy. I got about a quarter of the way through this before I realised, to my delight, it was a sequel to Ordinary People. And my enjoyment was not assisted by what I often felt to be over-writing (particularly of some rather odd sex scenes) and by rather too many rather extraneous scenes (a trip to Portugal, a camping trip to Sussex, a starring role in a Panto) and additional characters. This novel features some of the same characters from the author's earlier novel, Ordinary People, which is about the breakdown of Melissa and Michael's relationship and their friendship with Damian and Stephanie. And whilst it was beautifully written, there were fair chunks that I completely skimmed or skipped over as I didn't really feel like they added anything to the part I was reading, nor would I miss anything important if I didn't read them.I loved musical diva Nicole and how Hazel's comments about Ed Sheeran and Beyonce made me laugh out loud. I put the book down for several days on three separate occasions, reading some interesting novels in between, and frankly, would have abandoned it entirely were it not to be discussed in our book group. I think without that knowledge the book can be difficult to follow as characters are introduced with at best incomplete back stories otherwise – as can be seen from a number of other reviews. The three sisters have a close yet strained relationship as they try to manage their own complicated lives as well as deciding how to help their mother, Alice, enter the next phase of her life. With her grown children torn about whether they should allow her to go, they feel threatened as the family dynamic might crumble to pieces.