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Monica Ali's stunning second book is a collection of stories set in the Alentejo province of Portugal, linked by characters and by a vivid sense of place and time.

We meet Teresa, a beautiful young girl from the village who is supposed to marry a suitable man from the same community but who wants to see the world, to desire more. We meet Vasco, a café owner who lived in America for ten years and thinks more highly of himself than he should. He is losing business to the new internet café down the road. We meet several English tourists: a young couple engaged to be married and confronting each others’ weaknesses and idiosyncrasies for the first time and an older woman imagining a new life, fantasizing about never returning home. And we meet the unseemly, dysfunctional but strangely riveting Potts family, ex-patriots who cobble together a life, at odds with one another until they run into trouble on the outside and then they hunker down, shut out of the world.

Monica Ali has an astonishing ability to portray vastly different characters and to make them sympathetic. This is a writer of immense talent and humanity with an agile wit that makes reading her work a complete pleasure.