Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2019.
'I am shouting from the rooftops to anyone who will listen about this book. It’s so so good – realistic and funny and so truthful it almost winded me' Dolly Alderton, The High Low
Two couples find themselves at a moment of reckoning. Melissa has a new baby and doesn't want to let it change her. Damian has lost his father and intends not to let it get to him. Michael is still in love with Melissa but can't quite get close enough to her to stay faithful. Stephanie just wants to live a normal, happy life on the commuter belt with Damian and their three children but his bereavement is getting in the way. Ordinary People is an intimate study of identity and parenthood, sex and grief, friendship and ageing, and the fragile architecture of love.
WINNER OF THE SOUTH BANK SKY ARTS AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION
"Diana Evans is a lyrical and glorious writer; a precise poet of the human heart" (Naomi Alderman, author of The Power)
"Thoughtful and intelligently observed... Evans's delicate prose weaves issues of racial identity and politics into the narrative so that they never feel heavy-handed...a deftly observed, elegiac portrayal of modern marriage, and the private – often painful – quest for identity and fulfilment in all its various guises" (Observer)
"Ordinary People...is very insightful… a detailed, well observed description of modern marriage" (Good Housekeeping)
"It could easily be reimagined for the screen, though the film would not capture the sheer energy and effervescence of Evans’s funny, sad, magnificent prose" (Guardian)
"Achieves a moody, velvety atmosphere, as though events were unfolding under amber-tinted bulbs...offers a precise sketch of the British black middle class, with a daring fifth-act twist" (Katy Waldman New Yorker)
"Evans gives us romance going cold with just as pitiless a precision as Flaubert in Madame Bovary... Evans's prose is magnificent: it's as if she measured each sentence, trimmed the excess weight, then fitted it into place" (Daily Telegraph)
"One of the very many things that makes this book exceptional is the even-handed sympathy and unflinching fidelity with which Evans charts the changing weather both of her protagonists’ emotions and family life. She excels at dialogue and she’s also a soulful lyrical chronicler of London in all its moods and guises" (Daily Mail)
"I’m currently very much enjoying Diana Evans’s novel Ordinary People, which takes a forensic look at the pleasures and perils of marriage and parenting and modern London living" (Guardian, Best Summer Books)
"Ordinary People offers a unique insight into the complexities and the challenges of modern life, identity and that lovely little thing we call love. From the moment I started to read it I was absolutely gripped - that’s how good it is. It is a beautifully crafted, honest exploration of how relationships are forged and deconstructed, and how the everyday and the remarkable can exist side by side." (Benjamin Zephaniah, South Bank Sky Arts Awards 2019)
"There is something radical in how Evans depicts the lives of young, black people, faithfully, fully and quietly" (Financial Times)