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Monica Ali earned lavish praise - a Booker prize nomination and so on - for her first novel, Brick Lane (2003), set in Tower Hamlets, London. Her second, Alentejo Blue (Doubleday, £14.99), is certainly a geographical departure, being set in Portugal, but it's not a departure in terms of achievement. Second novels are usually accompanied by the epithet "difficult", though it's never clear whether that refers to the writer's or reader's experience. Ali may have - indeed, surely has - sweated blood and tears writing Alentejo Blue, but there's no evidence of struggle on the page; and it would take a perverse reader to find the fictional world she conjures "difficult".
That's not to say it's not thought-provoking or haunting. In Alentejo Blue, which charts the lives, loves, hopes and fears of locals, expats and passers-by in a provincial
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tim auld says Monica Ali’s second novel is a triumph of storytelling
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village, Ali achieves that rare thing: a concise novel which tells us more about the characters than should be possible in the space available, but which, paradoxically, tantalises, leaving us longing for more. In short, the world she creates seems to exist beyond the mere bounds of her 297 pages - it doesn't feel like something she made up, but something she and we have been lucky enough to stumble upon. It's a triumph of storytelling.
Having said that, don't expect the inhabitants of Alentejo to be a bundle of laughs - it's all about people in search of an idyll or longing to leave; think Chekhov's sisters maundering on about going to Moscow - and don't expect to find an enlightening pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. "Yes - oh dear yes - the novel tells a story," EM Forster said. Maybe, next time, Ali will show us what else it can do. 
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POSTED JUNE 6, 2006
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