Critical responses to all three were mixed. In the Kitchen followed, a meandering tale of a London chef in crisis, and then Untold Story, an odd novel in which Princess Diana fakes her death and moves to small-town America. First came Alentejo Blue, loosely linked vignettes set in a Portuguese village that bore almost no relation in style, conviction or tone to Brick Lane. In the decade following her bestselling 2003 debut, Brick Lane, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize then turned into a film, Monica Ali produced three more novels. It is a painfully resonant book and could not have come at a more urgent time.įatima Bhutto £11.43 (RRP £12.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Caste joins the New York Times’ “1619 Project” in exposing the edifice of white platinum privilege and exploding how we understand American power and supremacy. Wilkerson has a deft narrative touch and she activates the history in her pages, bringing all its horror and possibility to light, illuminating both the bygone and the present. This is an American reckoning and so it should be. In Caste, Wilkerson sets out to understand American hierarchy, which she compares with two of the best known caste systems in the world: that of India, the very birthplace of caste, and of Nazi Germany, where caste as a modern experiment in barbarism was ultimately vanquished. It was while working on her sweeping, Pulitzer prize-winning first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, a history of African Americans’ great migration out of the South, that Wilkerson realised she was studying a deeply ingrained caste system that had been in place longer than the nation itself had existed, dating back to colonial Virginia. The full pageantry of American cruelty is on display in Caste, an expansive interrogation of racism, institutionalised inequality and injustice.
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