SEX, LIES AND FAMILY TIES

Monica Ali’s new novel might leave you breathless, but its rewards are well worth the exertion

- Shougat Dasgupta

Monica Ali confessed in a recent interview that the reception of her last novel, Untold Story, left her paralysed for a decade with depression and a catastrophic loss of confidence. Critics, and perhaps readers, she says, were left “confused” by a writer they associated with immigrant narratives turning her hand to a counterfactual about Princess Diana. Stay in your lane, Ali assumed they were saying. That she was foolish and naive to think she could write about “whatever I wanted, like a white male writer can”.

After 11 years, Monica Ali has re-emerged with her fourth novel, a familiar blockbuster. Having read about her dejection at the critical obsession with taxonomy, the desire to bully certain kinds of writers (women and minorities) and to put them in their place, you almost wish she would come back fists swinging, flipping the bird at her critics with a radical departure from what you might imagine to be the ‘typical’ Ali novel. But who wants to tell a writer what to write?