Ordinary People

Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019

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Summary

**AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4 BOOK CLUB**

'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

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.

Set in London to an exhilarating soundtrack, Ordinary People is an intimate study of identity and parenthood, sex and grief, friendship and ageing, and the fragile architecture of love.

'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

'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

Reviews

Diana Evans is a lyrical and glorious writer; a precise poet of the human heart
Naomi Alderman, author of The Power

About the author

Diana Evans

Diana Evans is the author of the novels 26a, The Wonder, Ordinary People and A House for Alice. She was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers for 26a, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel, the Guardian First Book, the Commonwealth Best First Book and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Ordinary People won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, for which A House for Alice was also a finalist. A former dancer, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her journalism and nonfiction appearing in Time magazine, the Guardian, Vogue and the Financial Times among others. She lives in London.

www.diana-evans.com

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