Alentejo Blue

With the 2003 publication of her acclaimed debut novel, Brick Lane in 2003, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Monica Ali established herself as a keen observer of the human condition, in all its ordinariness and its follies. The setting was England, pre-and post-9/11, in an apartment house occupied mostly by Bangladeshi immigrants. In Alentejo Blue, the setting is a village community in Portugal, called Mamarossa. Once again, Ali has turned her unerring eye on the inner landscape of her characters. In a series of episodic vignettes, she limns the daily lives, hopes, wishes, and dreams of villagers and visitors alike. Her special gift is capturing the small detail that shows the person: the filthy rag that Vasco mindlessly uses to wipe the tables in his cafe as he muses about his dead American wife and what he will eat next; the smelly never-washed clothes that drunken China Potts appears in again and again. She doesn't shrink from the disgusting or the gross, but her revelations are never gratuitous. This is information the reader needs.