Brick Lane

Ali, Monica

ISBN 10: 0007176899 ISBN 13: 9780007176892

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2004

Synopsis

Reissue with PB edition.

This exciting and deeply moving debut novel follows the tumultuous life of Nazneen from her birth in a Bangladeshi village hut, to her arranged marriage to Chanu and the subsequent move to London’s Tower Hamlets.

Nazneen’s inauspicious entry to the world, an apparent stillbirth on the hard mud floor of a Bangladeshi village hut, imbues in her a sense of fatalism that she carries across continents when she is married off to Chanu. Her life in London’s Tower Hamlets is, on the surface, calm. For years, keeping house and rearing children, she does what is expected of her. Yet Nazneen walks a tightrope stretched between her daughters’ embarrassment and her husband’s resentments. Chanu calls his elder daughter the little memsahib. ‘I didn’t ask to be born here,’ say Shahana, with regular finality.

Into that fragile peace walks Karim. He sets questions before her, of longing and belonging; he sparks in her a turmoil that reflects the community’s own; he opens her eyes and directs her gaze – but what she sees, in the end, comes as a suprise to them both.

While Nazneen journeys along her path of self-realization, a way haunted by her mother’s ghost, her sister Hasina, back in Bangladesh, rushes headlong at her life, first making a ‘love marriage’, then fleeing her violent husband. Woven through the novel, Hasina’s letters from Dhaka recount a world of overwhelming adversity. Shaped – yet ultimately not bound – by their landscapes and memories, both sisters struggle to dream themselves out of the rules prescribed for them.

Beautifully rendered and, by turns, both comic and deeply moving, Brick Lane establishes Monica Ali as one of the most exciting new voices in fiction.

About this title

Review:

With its gritty Tower Hamlets setting, this sharply observed contemporary novel about the life of an Asian immigrant girl deals cogently with issues of love, cultural difference and the human spirit. The pre-publicity hype about Brick Lane was precisely the kind to set alarm bells ringing (we've heard it so often before), but, for once, the excitement is fully justified: Monica Ali's debut novel demonstrates that there is a new voice in modern fiction to be reckoned with.

Nazneen is a teenager forced into an arranged marriage with a man considerably older than her--a man whose expectations of life are so low that misery seems to stretch ahead for her. Fearfully leaving the sultry oppression of her Bangladeshi village, Nazneen finds herself cloistered in a small flat in a high-rise block in the East End of London. Because she speaks no English, she is obliged to depend totally on her husband. But it becomes apparent that, of the two, she is the real survivor: more able to deal with the ways of the world, and a better judge of the vagaries of human behaviour. She makes friends with another Asian girl, Razia, who is the conduit to her understanding of the unsettling ways of her new homeland.

This is a novel of genuine insight, with the kind of characterisation that reminds the reader at every turn just what the novel form is capable of. Every character (Nazneen, her disappointed husband and her resourceful friend Razia) is drawn with the complexity that can really only be found in the novel these days. In some ways, the reader is given the same all-encompassing experience as in a Dickens novel: humour and tragedy rub shoulders in a narrative that inexorably grips the reader. Whether or not Monica Ali can follow up this achievement is a question for the future; it's enough to say right now that Brick Lane is an essential read for anyone interested in current British fiction. --Barry Forshaw

Review:

· '... Surely, Brick Lane can't be that good. Actually, it's better.' Observer

· 'In years to come, Brick Lane may be one of the Nation's Favourite Books.' Spectator

· 'Written with the wisdom and skill few authors attain in a lifetime.' Sunday Times

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0007176899
• ISBN 13: 9780007176892
• Binding: Audio CD