In this invigorating collection the novelist takes in Jean Rhys, James Baldwin, and how real life makes it into fiction

Diana Evans has written four novels, beginning with 26a, which follows twin sisters of Nigerian descent through their Neasden childhood, in north-west London, into an early adulthood marked by mental illness and bereavement. A cosy coming-of-age it was not, for all that it co-opted the comic tropes of intimate family life, and the startling cultural collisions inherent in second-generation immigrant identity. I was one of the judges of the inaugural Orange award for new writers in 2005, which Evans won, and recall how impressed our panel was by her ability to blend myth and mundanity, trauma and optimism, and perhaps particularly by how alive she was to the exigencies and bewilderments of existing as a questioning individual within a group itself under pressure.

The essays in this collection – some of them recent and original, others pieces of journalism to which Evans has occasionally added later perspective and qualification – provide much context to her fiction. This has included The Wonder, which explored the development of Caribbean-influenced dance in the UK, and two loosely linked later novels, Ordinary People (2018) and A House for Alice (2023), which ranged in topic from middle-class marital disenchantment to the aftermath of the Grenfell disaster and the realities of dealing with ageing parents.