Monica Ali has been named by Granta as one of the twenty best young British novelists. She is the author of In the Kitchen, Alentejo Blue, and Brick Lane, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She lives in London with her husband and two children.
The Usual Desire to Kill (2025) Camilla Barnes "Hilarious and heartbreaking, packed with acute and painfully funny observations about relationships and family dynamics. Barnes's dialogue is pitch-perfect, and her characters dance off the page and straight into your heart. Mum and Dad are magnificent creations, eccentric and endearing, both instantly recognizable and utterly singular."
Choice (2024) Neel Mukherjee "Choice burns brightly with fierce intelligence, with wisdom and compassion, and achieves what so few novels even attempt: it makes the reader think deeply about how we've come to live this way, at what cost, and about those who pay the greatest price."
Lost on Me (2023) Veronica Raimo "I fell head over heels in love with Lost on Me. What a thrillingly original voice! Raimo writes with a tender brutality that is simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking."
Little Monsters (2023) Adrienne Brodeur "Smart, funny and beautifully written. Brodeur is a brilliant dissector of family relationships, a lyricist of the natural world, and an astute observer of our inner turmoils."
8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster (2023) Mirinae Lee "A wild ride of a novel that embodies twentieth-century Korean history through the mesmerising, heartbreaking and deeply fractured personal history of one woman and her many incarnations."
A House for Alice (2023) Diana Evans "A wise, tender novel about family and love that explores the tension between duty and desire and the question of what 'home' really means."
My Nemesis (2023) Charmaine Craig "A blisteringly smart novel about feminism, identity and desire that refuses easy answers and will linger for a long time in my mind."
Call and Response (2023) Gothataone Moeng "It's a terrific collection, deeply rooted in place, sharply observed, comic, fierce, with a fine sense of the tragedy and absurdity of life. I hope it attracts the wide readership it deserves."
Scary Monsters (2022) Michelle de Kretser "Scary Monsters is a novel of luminous intelligence and profound depth, written with verve, humor, and exceptional elegance."
My Phantoms (2021) Gwendoline Riley "I read My Phantoms with great pleasure. It's a wonderful combination of achingly sad and subversively funny, simultaneously sharp and tender, and always finely observed. The dialogue is pitch perfect. The relationships are agonising. It's a subtle book, with big themes lightly drawn and precisely rendered, about how to live and how to love."
Never Anyone But You (2018) Rupert Thomson "NEVER ANYONE BUT YOU is a delightful, surprising and highly accomplished novel that puts a hidden piece of history into its long overdue place in the spotlight. Rupert Thomson deftly weaves a story that spans several decades, the Paris surrealists, Nazi-occupied Jersey, heroic acts of resistance, and intense and enduring (and forbidden) love into one seamless whole. I was gripped, thrilled, entertained and deeply moved."
A Spool of Blue Thread (2015) Anne Tyler "What a wonderful, natural writer she is . . . She knows all the secrets of the human heart."
The Memory of Love (2010) Aminatta Forna "A subtle and complex exploration of both the psyche of a war-torn African state and the attractions which it holds for an outsider. Forna is a writer of great talent and courage, one who never shies away from asking the difficult question."
The Family Tree (2004) Carole Cadwalladr "Funny, fast and fresh. . . . Hats off to Carole Cadwalladr. It was such a pleasure to read. . . . A rare find."
(b.1967)
