Brought to you by Penguin.

Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast where we talk to writers about writing.

I'm Izzy Souti and today I'm speaking to Diana Evans, the prize-winning and much-loved author

of Ordinary People.

Her latest novel, A House for Alice, has just been released, and I'm delighted to have a chance to talk to her about it and her writing today.

Diana, welcome to the Penguin podcast. Hi, Izzy. Thank you. It's good to be here. Well, I've just told you, I cried. I did the crying in a coffee shop thing. I don't know if you've ever done that when you've finished a book and you think, I don't know if I should have finished this book in public because I'm crying my eyes out. Oh, that's good to hear. I absolutely loved this book. It's so bursting with life and it's so bursting with, I'm going to come on to this yearning. To me, that really popped out to me that all the characters are yearning for one thing or another. So it's centred around three sisters, Carol, Melissa and Adele and their mum, Alice. They've lost their dad towards the beginning of the book.

But there's so many other characters in it or with their own flaws and their own yearnings,

their own tragedies. I'd love to know what, first of all, what the starting point was for you

with the story. Because there are two fires early on. There's Grenfell, which is sort of constantly

for me, underlines the whole plot. And there's a smaller fire, which is more

personal to the girls. Was that the starting point for you? And yeah, how did you begin?

Well, it's interesting that you talk about yearning because it began with yearning,

with this idea of Alice yearning to go back home to Nigeria and being at this point in her life

where she's moved over to the UK and she's had her children here, she's had her family here.

And her family is, you know, you'd think that your family is where you're at home.

But actually, to her, Nigeria is where she wants to be,

even though she'll be away from her family. So I was interested in that yearning and the kind of

impracticality and the dichotomy of it and how that yearning could be applied to different characters

and different relationships and dynamics in the book. And when I was

thinking about this, there was so much going on around me politically and socially in the context

of contemporary life in Britain. And especially with Grenfell, I felt like I couldn't ignore it.

You know, we're writers and we can't ignore these national traumas.

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