Brick Lane (Shortlisted For The Man Booker Prize 2003)(THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER) (Paperback)

Summary of the Book
Set in the Bangladeshi part of East London, this book tells the story of two Bangladeshi sisters. Nazneen is married to a husband she doesn’t love, and she struggles with her own desires. Hasina is prettier than her sister, and she eloped with a lover. Nazneen’s husband is much older than her, and he lives in London. Nazneen didn’t speak much English, and her initial tribulations center around her discomfort with her new life and her loveless marriage. Hasina writes to her about her life, and Nazneen becomes jealous. After several years, Nazneen has two daughters and she still feels no love in her marriage. Twelve years after she first arrived in London, she begins a fiery affair with a man named Karim and she begins to find the voice she never had to speak up and say what her heart desires. But sometimes, duty is more important than desires. Can Nazneen choose between her responsibilities as a dutiful wife and her desires as a woman in need of love?

Back Cover
'Brick Lane has everything: richly complex characters, a gripping story and it's funny too... This highly evolved, accomplished book is a reminder of how exhilarating novels can be: it opened up a world whose contours I could recognize, but which I needed Monica Ali to make me understand' Observer

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 home for a block of flats in London's East End. In this new world, where poor people can be fat and even dogs go on diets, she struggles to make sense of her existence - and to do her duty to her husband. A man of inflated ideas (and stomach), he sorely tests her compliance. But Nazneen submits, as she must, to Fate and devotes her life to raising her family and slapping down her demons of discontent. Until Karim, a young radical, steps into the picture. Against a background of escalating racial and gang conflict, they embark on an affair that finally forces Nazneen to take control of her life ...