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Ordinary People

Diana Evans

$19.99

Paperback

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English
Vintage
07 March 2019
`You can take a leap, do something off the wall, something reckless. It's your last chance, and most people miss it.'

Two London couples find themselves at a moment of reckoning. Melissa has a new baby and doesn't want to let it change her but, in the crooked walls of a narrow Victorian terrace, she begins to disappear. Michael, growing daily more accustomed to his commute, still loves Melissa but can't quite get close enough to her to stay faithful.

Meanwhile out in the suburbs, Stephanie is happy with Damian and their three children, but the death of Damian's father has thrown him into crisis - or is it something, or someone, else?

Ordinary People is an intimate study of identity and parenthood, sex and grief, love and ageing. It is the story of our lives, and those moments that threaten to unravel us.

By:  
Imprint:   Vintage
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 196mm,  Width: 128mm,  Spine: 28mm
Weight:   240g
ISBN:   9781784707248
ISBN 10:   1784707244
Pages:   352
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Diana Evans is a British author of Nigerian and English descent. Her bestselling novel, 26a, won the inaugural Orange Award for New Writers and the British Book Awards deciBel Writer of the Year prize. It was also shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel, the Guardian First Book, the Commonwealth Best First Book and the Times/Southbank Show Breakthrough awards, and longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, The Wonder, is currently under option for TV dramatisation. She is a former dancer, and as a journalist and critic has contributed to among others Marie Claire, the Independent, the Guardian, the Observer, The Times, the Telegraph, Financial Times and Harper's Bazaar. Ordinary People is her third novel, and received an Arts Council England Grants for the Arts Award. She lives in London. @DianaEvansOP www.diana-evans.com

Reviews for Ordinary People

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


  • Long-listed for Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Awards 2019 (UK)
  • Short-listed for Orwell Prize 2019 (UK)
  • Short-listed for Women's Prize for Fiction 2019 (UK)
  • Short-listed for Womens Prize for Fiction 2019 (UK)

See Also