am because the baby is awake, and ideally the book will lift me out of the weariness and frustration of those moments, but this one didn’t. There were many times when I had to set the book down and reflect on a passage that I had just read. The story begins with two tragedies- nonagenarian Cornelius Winston Pitt eager to live to see his one-hundredth birthday breathes his last after a fire engulfs his home.

Wasps flew in through the skylights and smashed against the ceiling fan, spiders nestled in the sloping corners, when they ventured out she faced them with an upside-down cup and a postcard, the way Michael used to do. I loved the emotionally-charged writing and the complicated depictions of relationships (parents, children, siblings, spouses, friends and lovers) in turmoil and conflict (and some few but transcendent moments of joy).

Khadija Saye and Mary Mendy, among others, haunt these pages as two or three warring families try to find their way back to happiness. The chapter describing the morning divorced parents take their son to the hospital for surgery was so beautiful, so real, the experience transforming for the parents. It includes complicated familial and romantic relationships, racism, and political and social issues with the Grenfell tragedy and other current events such as Harry and Meghan's wedding, Brexit and Boris Johnson's blundering in the background.

ARC // I have a lot of thoughts about this book - both good and bad - so I'm going to try and be a coherent as possible with this review. At the novel’s center is Alice herself, the Pitt matriarch who, after fifty years in England, now longs to live out her final years in her homeland of Nigeria.Alice was thinking about her own next world and her own castle, which was not in Kingsbury or in Kilburn.