Author of the week: Monica Ali

last updated 8 January 2015

“Seven years ago, Monica Ali enraged Bangladeshi elders in the East End of London with her debut novel, Brick Lane,” said Benedicte Page in the London Guardian. Her fourth novel, due in June, will likely have the same effect for some in the royal family. Untold Story is an alternative history that imagines what would have happened in the life of Princess Diana if she hadn’t been killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997. “If the tragedy had never happened, and Diana were still alive, she would have turned 50 this year,” says Ali. “When she died, she seemed to be at some kind of crossroads in her life. Over the years since her death, I’ve sometimes found myself wondering how she would have matured.”

The pre-1997 years of the princess in Ali’s story are partially fictionalized, said Sarah Lyall in The New York Times. Diana was used, says the author, as a “point of departure to examine the past and imagine the future for my character.” But the resemblance is meant to be unmistakable. The new novel’s scheduled U.K. release just before Prince William’s planned April wedding to Kate Middleton may seem mercenary, but Ali insists it’s all coincidence. “All my books are about identity, about what makes a person who they are,” she told the London Daily Mail. “This novel is no different.” Should the book ruffle some feathers, Ali says she’ll consider it an accurate reflection of her subject. Diana “broke all manner of rules,” says Ali. “She was a gorgeous bundle of trouble.”