Monica Ali

Food can embody our personal history as well as wider cultural histories. But what are the stories we tell ourselves about the kitchen, and how do we first come to it? How do the cookbooks we read shape us? Can cooking be a tool for connection in the kitchen and outside of it? In these essays thirteen writers consider the subjects of cooking and eating and how they shape our lives, and the possibilities and limitations the kitchen poses. Rachel Roddy traces an alternative personal history through the cookers in her life; Rebecca May Johnson considers the radical potential of finger food; Ruby Tandoh discovers other definitions of sweetness through the work of writer Doreen Fernandez; Yemisí Aríbisálà remembers a love affair in which food failed as a language; and Julia Turshen considers food’s ties to community. A collection to savour and inspire, In the Kitchen brings together thirteen contemporary writers whose work brilliantly explores food, capturing their reflections on their experiences in the kitchen and beyond.

Imagines what the fate of Princess Diana might have been had she not died in Paris in 1997, in a story about the cost of fame and the possibility of reinventing a life.

Monica Ali's debut novel, Brick Lane, was published in 2003 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name. Carrying into her adult years a sense of fatalism instilled during her hardscrabble birth, Nazneen finds herself married off to a man twice her age and moved to London, where she begins to wonder if she has a say in her own destiny.

What if Princess Diana hadn't died? What if the tragedy in the Alma Tunnel never happened, and she were still alive today? Where would she be, and what would she be doing? Diana's life and marriage were fairy tale and nightmare rolled into one. Adored by millions, in her personal life she suffered heartbreak and betrayal. Within a life of privilege, she frequently felt trapped and alone. Surrounded by glamour and glitz and the constant attentions of the press, she fought to carve a meaningful role for herself in helping the needy and dispossessed. Constrained by protocol and precedent, she refused to follow the rules. The contradictions and pressures of her situation fuelled her increasingly reckless behaviour, but her stature and her connection with her public never ceased to grow. Had she lived, what direction would her life have taken? How would she have matured into her 40s and beyond? Untold Story takes the life of the world's most famous woman as a point of departure, imagining a future and examining the nature of celebrity, the meaning of identity, and the need to find one's place in the world. Like Diana, the fictional princess who is the novel's heroine, is both icon and iconoclast. Will she ever find peace and happiness in her own life, or will the curse of fame always be too great?

Analyse : Roman de société. Roman psychologique (intime).