Untold Story
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4.0 • 11 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
She was the most famous woman in the world. She died tragically, too young, in a terrible accident. The world mourned. Monica Ali, the beloved author of Brick Lane, explores the extraordinary question: what if she hadn't died?
Lydia lives in a nondescript town somewhere in the American Midwest. She's a nice, normal woman - if strikingly beautiful. She lives a nice, normal life: her friends are normal, her job is normal, her hobbies are normal. Her friends and boyfriend adore her.
But her past is shrouded in mystery. Who is Lydia? Where does she come from? And why is her English accent so posh?
Lydia is a woman with secrets. Extraordinary secrets. She might even be the most famous woman on the planet... a woman whose death the world mourned by millions.
Who is she?
*~*~* Praise for Untold Story*~*~*
'A beautiful, gripping accomplishment, a treat for the heart and the head, and will be a joy to readers who believe in the possibility that a book can transform your basic sense of life' Andrew O'Hagan
'A terrific, clever, multi-layered and subtle book (and let's not forget - hugely entertaining)' Joanne Harris
'Haunting and intensely readable, this is something between a thriller and a ghost story' Lady Antonia Fraser
'A startlingly intelligent, perceptive and entertaining piece of fiction. It's quite brilliant' Henry Sutton, Daily Mirror
'Thoughtful, compassionate... a suspenseful and gripping read' Suzi Feay, Financial Times
'Ali's third-person princess is a very convincing and sympathetic figure... extremely skilfully done' Tibor Fischer, Observer
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
From the author: “Writing this book, I tasked myself with examining the past and reimagining a new future for a character we all knew, and loved so well: Diana, Princess of Wales. Because I’m a writer, when I read, I’ve always got my analytical brain on as well. So it’s much harder to lose myself completely in a book—but when I’m writing, I can do that. When I’m on a good day, when I’m in flow, as some people call it, then six, seven hours can go past and I haven’t even noticed the time passing because that part of myself has just disappeared into the world of the characters. I spend a lot of time with them, sometimes years. I usually have a great deal of empathy and feeling for them, but I can’t choose a favourite. It’s like picking out of your children.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ali (Brick Lane) tackles a juicy premise: what if Diana hadn't died. Far from a salacious romp, though, this is a (sometimes too) slow character study of a woman in extraordinary circumstances. Here, Diana err, Lydia has escaped her life as an ex-princess for a new one in the states. All the real details of her previous life carefully researched and extrapolated from are there, with one exception; having survived the car accident, she later fakes her death (by drowning) and finds her way, via Brazil, to America. She ends up, on a darkly humorous whim, in an anonymous everytown called Kensington, where she builds a quiet life with her dog, Rufus, a job at an animal shelter, and a tight group of friends. When a British paparazzo stumbles into her town, though, her new life is threatened. This tense development is almost a subplot, overtaken as it is by Lydia's emotional exploration how she was nearing the edge before her "death," how unbearable but necessary it was for her to leave her sons, how she has matured and recovered over the years. The result is a very human rendering of a mythical woman who survives a tumultuous youth to find an aggressively calm middle age.
