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Literary Fiction

Diana Evans

Writing Coach

Diana Evans is the award-winning, bestselling author of four novels and a collection of non-fiction. Her prize nominations include the Guardian and Commonwealth Best First Book awards, and she was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. She has also been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize, twice for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Ordinary People.

Diana Evans writing coach at The Novelry

Diana Evans is the award-winning, bestselling author of four novels and a collection of non-fiction. Her prize nominations include the Guardian and Commonwealth Best First Book Awards, and she was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. She has also been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize, twice for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Ordinary People.

Diana began her writing career as a journalist and poet, before taking the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her debut novel, 26a, won the Orange Award for New Writers and the British Book Awards deciBel Writer of the Year prize. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Best First Book Award and the Times/South Bank Show Breakthrough Award, and nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, The Wonder, was also published to critical acclaim, described by The Times as ‘the most dazzling depiction of the world of dance since Ballet Shoes.’

Diana’s third novel, Ordinary People, was nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It was a New Yorker, New Statesman and Financial Times book of the year, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature. Her fourth novel, A House for Alice, is the highly acclaimed follow-up, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for which she was again shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

A former dancer, Diana has written extensively on dance, music, literature and culture in Vogue, Granta, the Guardian, TIME and elsewhere, a selection of which features in her non-fiction collection I Want to Talk to You: And Other Conversations. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

‘The most useful thing that I have learnt over years of writing is that the magic only comes when we face the page with humility and a readiness to fail.’

Diana Evans
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‘One of our most outstanding writers’—Bernardine Evaristo
A House for Alice
Ordinary People
The Wonder
26a
I Want to Talk to You: And Other Conversations

Novels by

Diana Evans

A House for Alice

A House for Alice

In the early hours of June 14, 2017, the world watches as flames leap up the sides of a residential high-rise in West London, consuming Grenfell Tower and many of the lives within it. Across town, an earlier spark has caught fire. A cigarette left burning in an ashtray. A table strewn with post-it reminders and old newspapers. And one Cornelius Winston Pitt—estranged husband, complicated dad, and Pitt family patriarch—takes his final breaths alone.

These twin tragedies open Diana Evans’s A House for Alice, an aching portrait of a family of women shaken by loss and searching for closure. At the novel’s center is Alice herself, the Pitt matriarch who, after fifty years in England, now longs to live out her final years in her homeland of Nigeria. Her three daughters are torn on the issue of whether she stays or goes, and while youngest sibling Melissa also grapples with the embers of her own failed relationship, the Pitt family’s foundational pillars—of trust, love, and cultural identity—begin to crack.

Intimately drawn and set against a fraught political backdrop, yet equally full of hope, humor, and humanity, A House for Alice traces the scars of grief and betrayal across generations and uncovers the secrets we keep from those closest to us.

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Ordinary People

Ordinary People

In a crooked house in South London, Melissa feels increasingly that she’s defined solely by motherhood, while Michael mourns the thrill of their romance. In the suburbs, Stephanie’s aspirations for bliss on the commuter belt compound Damian’s itch for a bigger life. Longtime friends from the years when passion seemed permanent, the couples have stayed in touch, gathering for births and anniversaries. But as bonds fray, the lines once clearly marked by wedding bands aren’t so simply defined.

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The Wonder

The Wonder

As a child Lucas thought that all children who’d lost their parents lived on water. Now a restless young man still living with his sister Denise on their West London narrowboat, he determines to find out more about the unexplained disappearance of his father, the charismatic Jamaican dancer, Antoney Matheus.

Thus unfolds a journey from fifties Kingston to Sixties Notting Hill and the host of unforgettable characters who peopled Antoney’s theatrical world, most importantly Carla, Lucas’s mother. The result is a haunting family mystery of absence and inheritance, the battle between love and creativity, and what drives a young man to take flight...

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26a

26a

Two small furry creatures scurry through the night to their deaths—and are reborn as twins Georgia and Bessi. The middle daughters of Aubrey Hunter and his Nigerian wife, Ida, they occupy the attic room at 26a Waifer Avenue in London. When the twins are eight, the family takes a three-year sojourn in Nigeria, where they live a relatively grander life (“We had servants,” Bessi later brags), but where Georgia has a terrifying run-in with a “ju-ju man” that changes her. The novel meanders as the girls grow, pausing to explore an intricate weave of childhood fantasy, African religion, nightmare, pop mythology and the intense inner world of identical twins. All the Hunters are drawn with care: hard-working Ida, who misses her mother so desperately that she converses with her daily in her head; hard-drinking Aubrey, whom liquor transforms into a Mr. Hyde; older sister Bel, rushing into adult sexuality; little Kemy, in love with Michael Jackson; and the twins, with their jokes, adventures and plans for a flapjack empire.

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I Want to Talk to You: And Other Conversations

I Want to Talk to You: And Other Conversations

As a young magazine intern, Diana Evans was catapulted overnight into the role of culture editor, and so began her career as a journalist, writing about musicians, dancers and artists, interviewing the likes of Viola Davis, Alice Walker and Edward Enninful.

In these portraits of contemporary icons, the author herself remains distant—always the observer. Alongside them, in essays and pieces collected here for the first time, we see her turning the lens on herself. We watch as she dances across stages in London and travels through Cuba. We sit beside her desk as she develops her voice as a writer, shaped by her love for Jean Rhys, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. We walk by her side as she navigates the world—her family and the midlife sandwich, reflections on fashion, yoga, the British monarchy and lockdowns, and the lasting impact of George Floyd and Grenfell.

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