The Wonder

The Wonder

Summary

‘Evans interweaves the strands of her three-generation narrative with an exhilarating sense of place and period’ Daily Telegraph

Read the dazzling family mystery from the Women’s Prize-shortlisted author of Ordinary People


As a child Lucas thought that all children who'd lost their parents lived on water. Now a restless young man still living with his sister Denise on their West London narrowboat, he determines to find out more about the unexplained disappearance of his father, the charismatic Jamaican dancer, Antoney Matheus.

Thus unfolds a journey from fifties Kingston to sixties Notting Hill and the host of unforgettable characters who peopled Antoney's theatrical world, most importantly Carla, Lucas's mother. The result is a haunting family saga of absence and inheritance, the battle between love and creativity, and what drives a young man to take flight...

‘Sparkles with mood, music and the sway of life’ Marie Claire


‘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, British Council and National Centre for Writing's International Showcase on Britain's 10 best BAME writers

Reviews

  • The most dazzling depiction of the world of dance since Ballet Shoes'
    Kate Saunders, The Times

About the author

Diana Evans

Diana Evans is the author of four novels, including 26a, The Wonder and Ordinary People. She has received award nominations for the Whitbread First Novel, the Guardian First Book, the Commonwealth Best First Book and the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction, and was the inaugural winner of the Orange Award for New Writers. 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 and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, for which A House for Alice was also a finalist. Her journalism appears in Time magazine, the Guardian, Vogue and the Financial Times and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in London.


www.diana-evans.com
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