At the tender age of eighteen, Nazneen’s life is turned upside down. After an arranged marriage to a man twenty years her elder she exchanges her Bangladeshi village for a block of flats in London’s East End. In this new world, where poor people can be fat and even dogs on diets, she struggles to make sense of her existence – and to do her duty to her husband.
But Nazneen submits, as she must, to Fate and devotes her life to raising her family and slapping down her demons of discontent. Until she becomes aware of a young radical, Karim…
‘Written with a wisdom and skill that few authors attain in a lifetime.’
Sunday Times
‘Splendid… Daring… Brilliant… Refreshing… Intensely gripping and involving… The power of Ali’s book is the way it charts its heroine’s slow accumulation of English, her gathering confidence as a mother and a wife, and the undulations of her marriage to a man whom she eventually learns to respect and perhaps even to love… Brick Lane is a great achievement of the subtlest storytelling.’
James Wood, The New Republic
‘Brick Lane has everything: richly complex characters, a gripping story and it’s funny too.’
Observer