Alentejo Blue: Paris Tunnel

S Ali Dept: We ve enjoyed Monica Ali s three previous novels, in descending order from her sparkling debut Brick Lane , Alentejo Blue and In the Kitchen . You can t accuse Monica Ali of being afraid to veer from the setting of the fabulously successful Brick Lane , which tracks an 18-year-old Bangladeshi woman through the immigrant streets of London s East End. The much slower-paced Alentejo Blue is set in Portugal; In the Kitchen tracks a United Nations task force all bent to their work in a Piccadilly hotel, according to The Star. It s Ali day. Scotland s terrific Ali Smith also milks unlikely events in her new novel, the awkwardly titled There but for the Hamish Hamilton Canada, 384 pages, $34 . A friend-of-a-friend stranger comes to a dinner party at a tony Greenwich house, locks himself in a bedroom and refuses to leave. For months. fiction Ali, alas, has lost us this time. Untold Story Scribner, 259 pages, $28.99 imagines that Princess Diana didn t die in that Paris tunnel. Instead, an Englishwoman named Lydia has been living a decade in a Midwest American town. Diana meets Cornpone Pete. But the past will ever loom . . . OMG. As reported in the news.
@t monica ali, hamish hamilton