There is a splash of Bolognese sauce on her T-shirt. She didn't have time to get changed before she came out. 'We holding off on the sandwiches, right?' says Suzie, the dark-haired friend. Delicate features, Peter Pan collar dress, French tip manicure. 'Where is Lydia?' says Amber, the blonde. There they are, sitting at the table, innocent of their unreality, oblivious to the story, naively breathing in and out. Three women, one dark, one blonde, the third a redhead - all in their prime, those tenuous years when middle age is held carefully at bay. Walk with me now across the backyard of the neat suburban house, in this street of widely spaced heartlands, past the kid's bike and baseball bat staged just so on the satin green lawn, up to the sweet glow of the kitchen window, and take a look inside. Once upon a time three girlfriends threw a little party for a fourth who had yet to arrive by the time the first bottle of Pinot Grigio had been downed.

Yes, it's a far cry from the rich Dickensian characters of Brick Lane, but did readers bat a mascaraed eyelash when Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates wrote novels - Of Women and Their Elegance (1980) and Blonde (2000) - about our most celebrated, haunted beauty, Marilyn Monroe?

London's Daily Mail scolded: 'This story, all the more depressing for being by the esteemed author of Brick Lane, is one that should have remained untold.'Īli's rather elegant and compulsively readable swan dive into popular fiction is less likely to cause much brouhaha stateside - except, perhaps, for objections to her wincingly generic portrait of so-called ordinary middle-class American life. Critics questioned the tastefulness of writing about the late Princess of Wales, and whether Ali, who made her name in 2004 with Brick Lane, an acclaimed literary novel that explored her multicultural Bangladeshi-British roots, should stoop to such a sensationalist subject. The publication of Monica Ali's third novel, Untold Story, which imagines a counterfactual future for Princess Diana in which she doesn't actually die in 1997 but instead flees to an undercover life in midwestern America, created something of an uproar in England this winter.

Lip appily ever after