The Grenfell Tower tragedy frames Diana Evans’s new novel, its opening chapter capturing something of the shock and horror of 72 lives lost to incompetence and malpractice, its closing pages bearing witness to a silent march of remembrance. As she writes of the green heart that comes to loom over Latimer Road tube station: “It put a cry in the sky.”
It’s a smaller, altogether more private fire that galvanises A House for Alice, however, one that breaks out on that same hot June night in 2017 and causes a forgetful old man, Cornelius, to succumb to smoke in the home where he once tyrannised his Nigerian wife and their three daughters.
