NEVER ENVY THE WRITER who makes it big with their first novel: they must do their growing up in public. Success doesn’t make the second novel any easier — it may have the opposite effect — and if it is a disappointment, everyone will notice. Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers was followed by the dismal Dead Babies; Zadie Smith’s White Teeth by the flat, wandering The Autograph Man.
Monica Ali’s debut — which, I note with horror, was published almost 20 years ago — was a deserved hit, a satisfying family story both traditional and new, about a young Muslim woman’s arranged marriage to an older man. Her subsequent books were admirable in their refusal to make ’s success into a formula, though the results — a collection of stories set in Portugal, a novel about a hotel kitchen, and, farthest away of all, a speculative fiction about Princess Diana’s life after death — had a mixed reception
