![]() Gabriel’s kitchen is immigrant Britain on display. 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. ![]() 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. Ali, an upper-middlebrow traditionalist, follows in their footsteps. In the Victorian era, writers like Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell wrestled with such questions in the “condition of England” novel. What does it look and sound like? Who gets included? What are its prospects? “In the Kitchen,” like her wildly successful first novel, “Brick Lane,” takes on multicultural, postcolonial Britain. Although she’s still in the early stages of her career, Monica Ali’s main themes are already coming into focus. ![]()
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