New Book by Monica Ali

For those that have read Brick Lane, Monica Ali is out with another book about immigrant integration. The New York Times book review:

In “Brick Lane” she explored, with comic gusto and pathos, the Bangladeshi immigrants and British no-hopers living in Tower Hamlets, an East London housing project. This time around, she ties her story to two self-contained social structures that allow her to trace Britain’s fault lines: the busy kitchen of a hotel restaurant in central London, where Gabriel Lightfoot, her main character, is executive chef, and an old mill town in the north of England, where Gabriel’s dying father has worked all his life.

Gabriel’s kitchen is immigrant Britain on display. “Every corner of the earth was represented here,” he reflects at one point. “Hispanic, Asian, African, Baltic and most places in between.” These are the drones who toil unseen in glittering London, desperate strivers, many with horrible stories to tell, or forget. As the novel begins, a Ukrainian kitchen worker turns up dead in one of the hotel’s subterranean passageways. His former lover, a sullen, waiflike pot-scrubber named Lena, becomes Gabriel’s personal reclamation project and his entryway to the underground economy, a shadowy world of illegal immigration schemes, slave labor and forced prostitution. This is the new Britain.