I must admit I was drawn to the book because of the potentially controversial subject matter, and I have to say that I enjoyed the earlier chapters when it was more 'is it her?' 'is it not her?' (I actually read this when it first came out and had managed to to avoid the spoilers). Maybe I'm a bit of a hypocrite because on one hand I was drawn to it because it was rumoured to be about Princess Diana but when it was made clear that was meant to be her I kind of went off it, not because I thought More...

Ler este livro fez-me recordar a altura em que lia as revistas como a Nova Gente ou a Lux, cada vez que saía uma notícia acerca da princesa Diana. Somos por natureza um pouco «cuscas» no que diz respeito a estas vidas glamorosas, apesar do reverso da medalha ser tão angustiante que na minha opinião, não trocaria a minha vida e o meu precioso anonimato por nenhuma coroa, tiara ou conta recheada!
A protagonista deste romance, Lydia, é o reverso da medalha de Diana. No livro, tanto Diana como Lydia More...

Originally Reviewed at Novel Escapes

I really wanted to love Untold Story. I grew up watching Princess Diana, from laying on the floor my legs splayed behind me, hands cupping my chin as I watched her walk down the aisle to become a princess at the tender age of six (is it any wonder that I have ridiculous romantic notions?) to the demise of her marriage and untimely death and I couldn’t wait to devour this story. Sadly though, I was disappointed.

Untold Story had an intriguing premise. How far w More...

I had been looking forward to reading this book for a long time, and I finally got to sit down with it while traveling for work - between meetings and in the early morning hours (thanks, jet lag!) by the hotel pool. It's a great book for reading that way - while traveling or on vacation.

I was at first disappointed by the rather flat, stock-character aspect of most of "Lydia's" friends - like the yoga friend who *always* sits in full lotus, every time she sits down. (Seriously. Who does that?). B More...

The book begins with an intriguing premise - what would have happened if Diana had not been killed in the tunnel in Paris? So begins the Untold Story. While the plot may be far fetched to imagine, once you begin reading the events do have a certain level of plausibility. More importantly for me, I found myself thinking about the dilemma "Lydia" was in. To NEVER be able to share her identity or confide in anyone EVER would be a large burden to carry. It also made me think of the role of paparazzi More...

I really enjoyed this book! Such an interesting idea. What if Diana (Lady, Princess, Her Royal Highness) had not died in a car crash, but DID fake her own death? What if she was still alive, living a normal existance in the United States? Could she be discovered? I kinda want a sequel to this one...(guilty pleasure).

Publisher's Weekly Review:
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 More...

Its no secret that everyone loves Princess Di. Its been over a decade since her death, and it seems like I can't go a week with out hearing about the British Royal Family and some connection to her. Now I know the press must have been absolutely awful to live with, which ironically is where I heard that from. Anyway The Untold Story by Monica Ali is about Diana. It shows her faking her own death and moving to the states, after some intense plastic surgery of course. Obviously it wasn't after the More...

While the premise of the story intrigued me, I found the story very weak.

I've always been a bit of a royalty buff, mostly due to the fact that I grew up with my mom a royalty buff, particularly the British Royal Family. So when I heard of this book, I wanted to read it. The idea of an alternate story for Diana. That instead of her untimely death, she faked her own death and tried to live a normal life with a new identity.

I even enjoyed the fact that the story was told from multiple points of v More...

I have no idea what I thought this was when I started reading it. Obviously I knew when I requested it from the library, but that was a long time ago, and I'd forgotten. So it was a little surprising to find that it was an imagined retelling of Princess Diana's story, if she'd not really died and had instead faked her own death and escaped to America [not a spoiler].

And I have to say that I loved the idea of it, but the execution was a bit weak. Or maybe it was just that this was ... badly edite More...

Even though I think historical fiction is a weird genre, I am really into it. I think it goes back to when I used to write in junior and senior high school and I would take a real situation of some sort (person, place or thing) and distort it a bit to make it better or more to my liking. And then I found out that this is an actual way some people write?! My dreams come true! But funny enough, I rarely pick up books like this. I think the published stuff is sometimes just too weird for me. This b More...

In the hands of a less capable writer, this 'what if Princess Diana staged her death and went off to live in anonymity' could have been very bad. In the continuum of Ali novels, however, I see this one as returning to some of the themes of Brick Lane and answering some of the questions that novel posed quite differently.

What if you made a huge mistake very early in life and that mistake led you down a path of self destruction? Would your sense of duty mean you had to keep going down that path? I More...

I can see, just by looking at the overall review average for Untold Story, that I'm totally in the minority for how much I liked it, but I did. I really admire Ali for taking on a subject and topic that's bound to raise a lot of heated opinions, and she clearly did her research--her portrait of Lydia as she was before she became Lydia was wonderful and true, at least in my opinion to who the person before Lydia became Lydia was probably right (Ali also clearly read Tina Brown's bio on the person More...

What if Diana, Princess of Wales, had not died, but instead had staged her death and escaped into anonymity? This is the premise of Monica Ali's new novel. The manner in which she creates the tale demonstrates her versatility, being the author who also gave us an inside look at Bangladeshi immigrants in Brick Lane and at the life of a top London chef with In the Kitchen.

The Princess, aided by her private secretary, takes on a new identity in Kensington, a small American Midwestern town, posing a More...

While I cannot call this novel completely unreadable, I cannot recommend it. It has received reviews that range from lukewarm to mediocre, which should have dissuaded me. However, the topic drew me, and probably thousand of other 40-something year old women. Lydia is Princess Diana and the novel revolves around what would have happened if Diana had faked her own death to get away from the trappings of her life. The first thing that bothered me was why the author didn't name her Nadia, which woul More...

This was a hugely entertaining story. I have never been a huge Princess Diana fan. I was too young to watch her wedding, and somewhat uninterested when her funeral was on, though the scenes of her sons were truly touching. I hadn't really given her much thought before, so when I saw that Monica Ali had written a novel about her what-if story, I was intrigued from a Monica Ali perspective rather than a Lady Di one. I loved Brick Lane, but had never read her other two novels, but I was intrigued t More...

This book was disappointing. I'm a huge Diana fan and always very interested in royal history through the ages, so this book intrigued me when I saw it at the library. What if Diana hadn't died in the tunnel, but faked her death a few months later so she could escape her life? That's the question this book asks. Aside from the fact that I don't think Diana would leave her sons no matter how bad things got (and from what I understand from reading reputable biographies of her, her life was actuall More...

PT/Eng:

PT: Sem palavras! Apesar da simplicidade com que está escrito, este é sem dúvida um dos livros que mais me suscitou o interesse desde o início do ano.
Tocando num tema que levanta de novo novas teorias acerca do assassinato da princesa Diana, Monica Ali conseguiu criar um enredo completamente novo e cheio de detalhes acerca do possível plano de fuga que a própria princesa poderia ter arquitectado com a ajuda do seu secretário pessoal. Este livro passasse então dez anos depois da morte da p More...

Untold Story imagines a reality in which Diana Princess of Wales faked her death and escaped to live a quiet life in small-town America. Going through an acute bout of Anglophilia, I picked this up to steep my brain in royalty and revisionist history.

Ali's novel is page-turner, a testament to the one truth of Diana's life - that we all wanted to know what she was doing and what would happen to her next.

The main characters - Lydia and the papparazzo - are portraits of the conglomeration of ideas More...

I admit to being enthralled by Diana. The height of that enthrallment was reading Tina Brown's excellent book on her. In it,everyone has both good and bad sides (except Camilla. She doesn't come off too well). Loving that book really set me up well to enjoy this fantasy. Tina Brown's analysis of the princess, her actions and motivations match the interior dialogue of Lydia in The Untold Story very well, so I do not have the same quibbles as many of the reviewers below. I enjoyed the what if plot More...

I have to admit that I wasn't aware of this latest book by Monica Ali, until I came across it at the library. I have read Brick Lane so liked her as an author and quite liked the concept of this book so decided to give it a go.

The basic premise is that Princess Di doesn't get killed in the tunnel in Paris but actually decides, with the help of her Private Secretary, to escape and end up living in small town USA. Now if you are a fan of conspiracy theories you may well believe she isn't dead or e More...

The characters all seemed very real and modern-they all had their faults and annoying parts, but were all fairly well constructed. Lydia, or rather, the Princess of Wales, was very well portrayed. It's difficult to grasp how a person would feel if they faked their own death, but I feel that Monica Ali did a very good job of creating those reactions.

There were many parts to this story, which at first was a bit confusing to me, but overall, I got the hang of them. However, those different parts a More...

Monica Ali's latest novel imagines that Princess Diana did not die in a car crash in a Paris tunnel but, rather, after plastic surgery in Brazil and the addition of brown contact lenses, has been living a quiet life as "Lydia" in an American suburb (Kensington, natch) and working at a dog kennel. Although Ali's Diana "dies" by drowning in shark infested waters, all the other players in the Princess's life make cameos (but not by proper name): her "husband's mistress," "that biography" and the so More...

I loved Brick Lane by Monica Ali and have recommended it for years, but there is little love about Untold Story. I sense Ali wanted to write a novel more commercially appealing than her others by trying to imagine "what if." In this case, what if Princess Di survived the accident in which Dodi Fayed died? What if she faked her own death, ran to Brazil for plastic surgery, what if. . .
Here is a list of my complaints about this book.
Lydia/Princess Di is a poorly developed character.
The writing in More...

A great "what if?" story as captured by Monica Ali. I was more fascinated by Princess Diana after her death, and this novel offers some additional insight into the tortured, bedazzling, yet brief life of a woman who was doomed from the start.

The novel is almost an epistolary that explores Diana's bulimia, relentless pursuit of unavailable men and misunderstood insanity. Who would blame her, after her abandonment at an early age? We are all doomed to repeat the past. The bad decisions and choice More...

Earlier this week while browsing the new books I stumbled upon "Untold Story" by Monica Ali, a delightful "what-if" exploring the life of a small-town woman named Lydia, who just might be the Princess of Wales ... if only she had not died in Paris, ten years prior. This book, like a recent Time article, explores how the effects of a decade take their toll on the People's Princess. This "untold story" revolves around the concept that a woman who desperately loves her children, but is plagued by t More...

I thought this was a load of rubbish and I rarely, if ever, say that about a book I have invested time in.
I read this to the end only to see if it had any redeeming features and I have to say that it does not-not for me anyway.
The idea for the book is good but even serious issues such as eating disorders and self-harm were treated in a flippant and superficial manner.
The dialogue was boring. I could not get a sense of any character or of the place in which it was set.
Men and women were treate More...

I really wanted to love this book. It was soooooo slow. And by the time it got going, it was nearly over.
It was a very interesting topic, and the story was well thought out. But...meh. Honestly, I'm glad it's finally over.