arack Obama’s 2008 election victory gave a jubilant opening to Diana Evans’s third novel, Ordinary People; the horrific Grenfell tragedy begins the sequel-of-sorts, A House for Alice. The blaze is described as “a massacre by negligence, a criminal activity, a corporate atrocity, an obliteration of families”. Evans imagines the fire with a righteous rage rarely seen in British contemporary fiction. The narration is nobly elegiac, too, envisioning in the flames “families rich in entireties of love […] wars remembered and seas remembered and sections of homework completed
