ORDINARY PEOPLE

26A

Georgia and Bessi are twins growing up in Neasden in the ‘80s. Born of a Nigerian mother and English father, they are forced to create their own identities, but as reality encroaches on their childhood fantasies they have to cope in a world of separateness.

A HOUSE FOR ALICE

After fifty years in London, Alice wants to live out her days in the land of her birth. Her three children are divided on whether she stays or goes.** 'Alice was thinking about her own next world and her own castle, which was not in Kingsbury or in Kilburn. It was far away from here, out in the fields near the edge of Benin City, a little house, long in the dreaming, which her relatives had been building for her for when it was time to go home . . .' In the wake of their father's death, the imagined stability of the family begins to buckle. Meanwhile youngest daughter Melissa is forging a new life but has never let go of a love she lost. Michael too remains haunted by the failed perfection of their past, even within the sturdy walls of his marriage to the sparkling Nicole. As Alice's final decision draws closer, all that is hidden between Melissa and her sisters, Michael and Nicole, rises to the surface . . . Set against the shadows of Grenfell and a country in turmoil, Diana Evans's ordinary people confront fundamental questions. How should we raise our children? How to do right by our parents? And how, in the midst of everything, can we satisfy ourselves?