Alentejo Blue
by Monica Ali
Doubleday, $225
Monica Ali made her name with Brick Lane, her debut novel chronicling the fortunes of a girl transplanted from a village in Bangladesh to a new life in a council flat in London by way of an arranged marriage.
Ali, though, was never at ease with the prospect of being pigeonholed as an ethnic writer, despite the fact that her novel was widely acclaimed for its depiction of London's South Asian diaspora, which had long been the object of cultural fascination in a country desperately insecure about its multiculturalism.
So, after the success of her first novel, Ali bought a house in the undulating plains of the Alentejo region of Portugal and turned her pen to the region's inhabitants, setting her second novel in Mamarrosa, a nondescript, allegorical village in the south of Portugal - a cultural world away from London's council flats.
Mamarrosa is populated with a strange assemblage of characters: a mixture of expatriates, tourists and estrangeiros, whose stories form the basis of the book. In nine chapters we're introduced to eight characters, with a rather contrived final scene in which they all converge for a party. There's Jo?o, the world-weary peasant who chances on the corpse of his old friend Rui hanging from a tree; Stanton, an alcoholic middle-aged writer working on his novel about Blake; Huw and Sophie, young British tourists who have rented a house; and Marco, a mysterious resident who left Mamarrosa long ago but whose expected return captivates the villagers.