Description

Two couples in south London face grief, desire and parenthood as their relationships begin to come apart.

Melissa has a new baby and fears that motherhood is shrinking in her world. Michael still loves her, but not steadily enough. Damian is grieving his father while trying to remain present for Stephanie and their children. Stephanie wants a good, ordinary life, but grief, desire and disappointment make that feel out of reach.

Ordinary People is a novel of Black British life, marriage, sex, parenthood, friendship and aging that captures the fragile architecture that holds a household together. Both gripping and universal, this London novel explores relationships and identity with insight and emotional honesty.

‘Diana is so amazing when it comes to writing about humans and relationships… I don’t know anyone who’s as skilled as her’ Candice Carty-Williams, Oprah Magazine

‘I am shouting from the rooftops to anyone who will listen to this book. It’s so so good – realistic and funny and so truthful it almost winded me’ Dolly Alderton

‘I just finished Ordinary People by Diana Evans, and it is utterly exquisite. What a writer she is – the depth of her insight, the grace of her sentences’ Elizabeth Day, Twitter

Publisher Review

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 * 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 -- Sarah Waters * Guardian, Best Summer Books * 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 * 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 * 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 * Diana Evans's fiction is emotionally intelligent, dark, funny, moving. The sheer energy in her novels is enthralling. A brilliant craftswoman, a master of the form, she makes the reader ask important questions of themselves and makes them laugh at the same time -- Jackie Kay 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 * Ordinary People...is very insightful... a detailed, well observed description of modern marriage -- David Nicholls * Good Housekeeping * 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 * Diana Evans is a lyrical and glorious writer; a precise poet of the human heart -- Naomi Alderman, author of The Power