Monica Ali's Untold Story; Philip Hensher's King of the Badgers and Margaux Fragoso's Tiger, Tiger

Princess Diana did not die in Paris, according to Untold Story: Monica Ali's novel posits instead that she survives a car crash, but then (wrote the Evening Standard's Sarah Sands) "fakes a drowning accident in order to start a new life, as Lydia, in smalltown America". "The fatal flaw in the novel is one of taste, " Sands declared, "which is somehow made worse because Ali is a distinguished novelist rather than a workaday hack. . . She should not be writing prurient royal novels based on wacko conspiracy theories." The Mail on Sunday's Craig Brown was harsher still, pronouncing the book "tosh" that "never rises above the level of Jackie Collins". As for the author's "pious explanations" of her motives: "Ali portrays the paparazzi as singularly insensitive, but where does that leave her' If she really intends it as a 'tribute' to Diana, would she be happy to give a copy to the princess's two sons'"

Reviews of Philip Hensher's King of the Badgers have not been so astringent, though it too draws on material with tabloid appeal. In the TLS, Edmund Gordon noted that the novel's fictional Devon town "becomes the focus of a national media storm"

 when a girl goes missing, a "central drama evidently based on the abductions of Madeleine McCann and Shannon Matthews". While praising "a powerfully delightful book, rich in drama and pathos, rowdy with life", he criticised the lack of a "cogent link" between its themes of privacy and surveillance. In the Independent on Sunday, DJ Taylor confessed to being "seduced" by Hensher's "coruscating intelligence", but spotted that he "seems to lose interest" in the child abduction storyline, and sniffed "the faint scent of desultoriness" in the myriad conversation scenes. Not seduced at all, the Evening Standard's Nick Curtis complained that it "left a bad taste in my mouth", calling the choice of subject matter "opportunistic at best, cynical at worst"; but Jane Shilling, in the Sunday Telegraph, enthused that Hensher's "enjoyment of his own cleverness and fluency is utterly infectious", oddly venturing that "were he not so marvellously himself, he might remind one of Thackeray".

Margaux Fragoso's Tiger, Tiger, a memoir of a 14-year relationship with a paedophile that began when she was seven, has polarised reviewers. For the Sunday Times's Daisy Goodwin, it was "almost as troubling as its awful subject matter", leaving the reader unsure if "her flat, affectless prose is a stylistic choice or simply the deadened testimony of a survivor". "I can't imagine why anyone would want to read this book," Goodwin concluded, "outside of Fragoso's therapist, members of her family and the odd paedophile looking for a cheap thrill." Julie Myerson disagreed in the Times, impressed by the author's ability "to explore her past with such unswerving honesty, courage and clarity". In the Observer, however, a debate on the book's merits proved one-sided. Rachel Cooke felt "exploitative, prurient and sometimes rather sick" after reading it; while the psychologist Oliver James commented that writing her experiences down may have benefited the author, but asked: "Why do we need to hear the story'" Like Goodwin, who referred to Lolita and Emma Donoghue's Room, he offered a literary comparison, contrasting the "undigested fact" of Tiger, Tiger with the "conversion of the lead of maltreatment into the gold of valuable literature" in the depiction of a family including an abusive father in Edward St Aubyn's Melrose novels.