Monica Ali’s second novel reads, in many ways, like a collection of tightly woven short stories. In the corners and at the edges of each chapter we see enough of the previously featured characters so as not to forget them in their orbits. But the center of the novel is something we never observe directly: the rural Alentejo region of Portugal, and in it the small village of Mamarrosa. In Ali’s construction, characters trace out the space of a village, and they are each defined, in turn by their mobility. The narrative defines a simple relationship: Fate is linked to travel or its absence. Simultaneously, places exist only in so far as people move through them. For Vasco, a weary restaurateur, his years in the United States serve as a melancholic foil to his counter-wiping loneliness, stuck back in Mamarrosa. For Teresa, the young woman planning escape to London for an uncertain life as an au pair, her personal freedom depends upon leaving the hometown that is smothering her.

The manuscript for her 2003 debut, Brick Lane, earned Ali a nod from Granta as one of Britain's 20 best young novelists before the book even made it to press. The story of a Bangladeshi girl sent to London for an arranged marriage and the struggles of Muslim immigrants was subsequently short listed for the Man Booker prize. Natasha Walter, writing in The Guardian, praised Ali's “slow-burn style” and her “winning way of exploring how the contradictions of life gradually build and knit together into experience.” The book's success was due in no small part to her navigation of the social lines radiating from the Bengali-London axis.

The brilliance of Ali's mapping in Alentejo Blue is a triangulation between the Portuguese characters who either struggle at home or struggle abroad, and the British tourists who can come to the region for its rural charm and then leave when they please. The shift in place underscores the social inequities within the European community—tensions and disparities that go forgotten in the East/West conflicts saturating the political and media landscape.

In the first chapter, we meet Joáo, a poor farmer who is watching a friend die. He thinks back to the breakup of the big estates that controlled the region and the workers' collectives that followed. But the collectives failed and the landowners are buying back the land. A Marco Alfonso Rodrigues is on his way back to the region to develop the area. Rodrigues does not appear until the ninth and final chapter, and despite this foreshadowing, his specter barely lingers over the intervening portion of the narrative. Ultimately, his mysterious return coincides with a village celebration that arcs the myriad trajectories of the characters—some melancholy, some comic—into a portrait of a place that slowly changes, but still stays the same. Rather than making the focus of the novel an obvious turning point for the region—the moment at which Rodrigues or another developer wrestles the land away from its provincial inhabitants—Ali deftly captures the wavering moment that immediately precedes the commercial exploitation of a rural area.

The estate owners were the first, and the developers will be the next, but at the moment it is the tourists who can come to the Alentejo and take what they need. Stanton, an ex patriot writer concocting a fictional biography of Blake in the countryside, is the first we meet. What he needs from Mamarrosa is an escape, a stereotypical place where life is slower and he can get some work done. Naturally, writing is difficult with the distractions of sleep, alcohol, and the women of a dysfunctional British immigrant family, the Potts. And he does not write well until he has his fill of the latter. Ali's twist on the fleeing writer motif is the book's first lunge towards tragicomic social satire. The Potts have been less than successful in Portugal. Jay, their son, starts hanging around Stanton's house to escape from his family. The writer finds himself helping China, Jay’s farmer father, move a dead cow carcass across the run-down farm, and Stanton realizes that he cannot help but get entangled with the Pottses. His encounter with their lower class lifestyle repulses him, but does not derail his lust for Chrissie, China’s wife, and Ruby, their daughter.

Ali's construction of Stanton's desire is a mockery of the roving male gaze. “If you fed her up and put her in decent clothes,” Stanton thinks, considering Chrissie, “she would not be bad-looking.” But “there was nothing you could do with those arms.” There is no sympathy for Stanton when the affair comes to China's attention. Stanton and Chrissie both find the distraction they need from their purely physical relationship. He hasn't had sex in four months and her family is the town joke. The inequity is not so much that Stanton judges Chrissie for her arms and sleeps with her anyway; it is that he can leave whenever he wants. He doesn't have to stay and maintain his dignity amidst the wreckage of a disheveled spouse, a promiscuous teenage daughter, and a yard full of chickens.

Part of Ali's virtuosity lies not just in her ability to construct a sense of place through her characters, but in her ability to build characters from a kaleidoscope of narrative perspectives. From the covetous gaze of Stanton we move into the slow-churning mind of Vasco, the restaurant owner who went to the United States to find his destiny, but lost the wife he found there and returned to wallow in his sadness. In losing control of his fate, he also lost control of his body, and his preoccupation with his obesity and aching body is onerous. “In all that churning and creaking and bloating and leaking,” Ali writes of Vasco, “he has no say.” In a subsequent chapter, readers glimpse the disarray of the Potts family over Jay's shoulder in a close third-person. The vantage point presents the lessons of the boy's life through a thin veil of naïveté. When his father says “I've got a thirst on,” Jay realizes it means “he was going to drink a lot of beer.” His concerns must stretch beyond his fledgling football team. He must feed the animals and clean the family's chicken shed because, “Those were the things that needed doing. Somebody had to get them done.”

Immediately following this chapter, Ali rotates the lens and we are seeing through the eyes of Eileen, a menopausal woman on holiday with her tactless husband. (“Frankly, I'm surprised you kept the weight off as long as you did,” he offers as a compliment of her middle-aged looks.) In her travelogue, the privilege of mobility is unfiltered. “I could be one of those Englishwomen,” she muses, thinking of how it might perturb her husband, “with fat ankles and capillaried cheeks and hair coming down from under a tattered hat who sets up in a place like this, to keep bees or grow runner beans or save donkeys.” Despite the grainy texture of everyday life for the Potts, and for service workers like Teresa and Vasco, Eileen and her husband see the village with the flat sheen of a travel guide. “Fascinating region, the Alentejo” he remarks, “Undiscovered”—a fact he attributes to it being the “poorest country in the European Union.”

In perfect contrast to Eileen's casual tour through the village is the story of Teresa. In the most well-plotted chapter of the novel, Ali follows through one day the cascading apprehensions of a young woman who has just learned that she has a position as an au pair waiting for her in London. Neither her family nor the boyfriend to whom she is planning to lose her virginity that evening know of her plans. She is desperate to escape the provincial town and her assigned fate: paying her ungrateful brother's way through school. For most of the characters, travel is either a failed path to economic freedom or an outright sign of wealth. The Potts left England, assuming their quality of life would improve in Portugal. It did not. Eileen and her husband—along with Huw and Sophie, a couple we meet late in the book who are scouting their wedding location—have trials and frustrations in the Alentejo. But these are limited in depth to middle class concerns: who picks the next vacation spot, nuptial details. For Eileen, asserting her desire to visit Portugal in the face of her husband's overbearing instance on choosing their holiday destinations is a small bubble of late-life feminism.

Teresa, however, will not bear another day beholden to the only man in her family. Upon the death of her father, “it was assumed without question that Teresa would give up school” for her brother Francisco. Her immediate avenue of emotional escape is into the arms of her boyfriend, Antonio. Their love, youthful and doughy-eyed, is described in appropriately syrupy language: “He lifted his face and their eyes locked. Teresa burned. The knowledge of what lay ahead welded them together. Forged in this moment was an everlasting bond. Where the minds, the souls came together, the bodies would naturally follow.” But the naive importance that Teresa attaches to their soon-to-be consummated relationship only heightens the tension surrounding her more necessary, more dangerous journey to England. She has on her best white dress (with blue flowers of Alentejo blue). She has the perfect music for their night together. She is “setting out for the rest of her life.” But she has yet to scrape together the money for a plane ticket to England. For young middle class men and women, losing one's virginity before heading to college can be of equally colossal importance. But the strength of Ali's story lies in our knowing that the life waiting for her as a caregiver for the young Indian children in London may not be any easier. It will probably be harder. But simply moving from here to there will be liberating.

Ali's opening epigraph lays out her simple mechanics of writing place through people and writing people through movement. She quotes José Saramago: “Villages are like people, we approach them slowly, a step at a time.” Alentejo Blue is a story of slows steps towards the people tracing out new lines defining freedom in the provincial countryside.