Monica Ali's third novel is an intriguing exercise in what-if? Set in small-town America, the main character, Lydia, lives an almost determinedly quiet life, working in an animal shelter, dating a dull but pleasant man called Carson and occasionally sharing a drink with a group of friends. But Lydia once inhabited a very different world. As the wife of a member of the British royal family, she faked her own death and left her two young sons behind for ever, in order to flee a life she found increasingly intolerable. Though Diana is never actually named, in all other respects it's very clear about whom Ali is writing. But while the premise might seem a little far-fetched, the execution is often engaging and psychologically perceptive, if not exactly incisive Ali has thought through the practicalities of how a princess might make herself disappear and the struggle she might have adjusting to what for her is anything but a normal life. She conveniently has her princess survive the crash in Paris only to "drown" during a solo swim.

The bulk of the book is made up of passages in the third person interspersed with the diary entries of the princess's former personal secretary, Lawrence Standing – the only one who knows the truth – with a few of Lydia's letters mixed in. The relationship between Lawrence and the woman who in many ways is the centre of his world is well-drawn and intriguing: his near worship of her and the way he unquestioningly helps her carry out her "little plan" form the most absorbing of Ali's narrative threads. She also touches on the complex role of the media in all this, the way it allows her to follow her children's lives from afar while also ensuring she can never see them again.

Elsewhere Ali seems uncomfortable with some of the traits of American speech and a shift in tone towards the end of the novel, when a stereotypically seedy paparazzo threatens Lydia's new life, is less successfully handled. The writing actually becomes less involving the more it's paced like a thriller; the novel is more engaging when it's observational, when Ali is gently exploring the idea of exile and starting one's life anew, placing her princess in an identikit American suburbia where she is finally able to find peace.

© The Guardian 2013

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