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Summary
Summary
Monica Ali, nominated for the Man Booker Prize, theLos Angeles TimesBook Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, has written a follow-up toBrick Lanethat will further establish her as one of England's most compelling and original voices.Gabriel L ightfoot is an enterprising man from a northern E ngland mill town, making good in London. As executive chef at the once-splendid Imperial H otel, he is trying to run a tight kitchen. But his integrity, to say nothing of his sanity, is under constant challenge from the competing demands of an exuberant multinational staff, a gimlet-eyed hotel management, and business partners with whom he is secretly planning a move to a restaurant of his own. D espite the pressures, all his hard work looks set to pay off.Until a worker is found dead in the kitchen's basement. It is a small death, a lonely death -- but it is enough to disturb the tenuous balance of Gabe's life.Elsewhere, Gabriel faces other complications. His father is dying of cancer, his girlfriend wants more from their relationship, and the restaurant manager appears to be running an illegal business under Gabe's nose.Enter L ena, an eerily attractive young woman with mysterious ties to the dead man. U nder her spell, Gabe makes a decision, the consequences of which strip him naked and change the course of the life he knows -- and the future he thought he wanted.Readers and reviewers have been stunned by the breadth of humanity in Monica Ali's fiction. S he is compared to D ickens and called one of three British novelists who are "the voice of a generation" byTimemagazine.In the Kitchenis utterly contemporary yet has all the drama and heartbreak of a great nineteenth-century novel. Ali is sheer pleasure to read, a truly magnificent writer.
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
The turbulent, multicultural London backdrop is the same, but the dutiful Muslim wife in transition, who drove the action of Ali's brilliant debut (Brick Lane, 2003, etc.), has been replaced by a very different kind of protagonist: a talented chef in midlife crisis. The future looks rosy for 42-year-old Gabriel Lightfoot. He has turned around a failing restaurant in an old London hotel and secured financial backing to open his own establishment, a lifelong dream. Marriage is in the cards with gorgeous girlfriend Charlie, a jazz singer. Yet the novel's first sentence signals the crack-up to come. A Ukrainian kitchen porter has been found dead in the restaurant basement. Another porter, young, rail-thin Lena from Belorusse, appears to be homeless. Gabe invites her to his place, a favor for which she matter-of-factly offers sex in return. Lena is cold and hardunsurprising, since she was trafficked into prostitution and is on the run from her brutal pimp. Gabe is startled to realize that he does indeed want to have sex with Lena, in fact is falling for her. Charlie finds out and dumps him. A visit to his dying father in the former mill town where he was raised brings back childhood memories. Meanwhile there's a kitchen to be run. Ali does a superb job of evoking this histrionic, occasional violent workplace manned by "a United Nations task force." She hints too at the dark world of bonded labor that lies beyond the kitchen, as a major scandal involving the hotel maids threatens to erupt and Gabe plays detective. It's too much for him; he has two panic attacks before losing it completely and roaming the streets like a madman. Ali takes risks here, and not all of them pay off. Gabe's obsession with Lena and subsequent breakdown are not wholly convincing, and Charlie gets shortchanged as a character. Moment to moment, however, the novel is engrossing. Flawed but still impressive, the work of a fearless writer determined to challenge herself. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
