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Brick Lane: By the bestselling author of LOVE MARRIAGE

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The novel was well received by critics in the United Kingdom and the United States, and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The response was bafflement. I remember one critic saying about Untold Story, ‘a curious marriage of author and subject matter’. People would ask ‘Are you trying to get away from something?’ To me the question they really seemed to be asking was ‘Are you trying to get away from brown people? Are you trying to get away from your ethnicity?’” Ali said. Time passes and Nazneen and Razia have their own sewing business. Nazneen hears regularly from Chanu, who writes to her from Dhaka about his workout routine and eating habits. She has no idea what he is doing for work and he doesn’t say. He calls once a month as well, and during one call, tells Nazneen that Hasina, whom he saw once at James and Lovely’s, has disappeared again. She has run off with Zaid. Nazneen, by contrast, is stepping out of the dusty box of her previous existence. Through TV and by conversing with her daughters, she becomes proficient in English and starts working from home. Chanu, perhaps surprisingly, encourages her in this. She begins to sew to earn the much needed money that her husband is failing to provide. He meanwhile is embroiling the family in debt to the local loan shark. Now Nazneen has unwittingly become the head of the family. Her new vocation leads to the introduction of the middleman, British-born Karim, who stammers when he speaks Bengali but ‘in English he found his voice’. Karim is shaped through the idealised perspective of Nazneen, who sees this younger man as a means of finding a much yearned for ‘place in the world’.

From her first appearance, Monica Ali has been hailed by critics as that rare thing, “a writer who seemed to have found, right at the beginning of her career and with absolute confidence, her own voice.” (Natasha Walter, The Guardian, 2006) a b Lewis, Paul (29 July 2006). " 'You sanctimonious philistine' – Rushdie v Greer, the sequel". The Guardian . Retrieved 29 July 2006.With her next novel, Ali returned to the broad ‘condition of England’ sweep and energised migrant environment of her debut. As the title suggests, Into the Kitchen (2009) used the hotel restaurant in central London as one microcosm from which Ali could range broadly over her now familiar themes of national identity, family and belonging. Scenes from this setting are set against the very different world of a northern mill town where the father of Gabriel Lighfoot, the London chef, is living out his last days. A wonderful first novel. Ali's writing is stunning, almost poetic at times, and she has a beautifully inventive turn of phrase' Mail on Sunday

One day, Chanu walks in on Karim using his computer. Nazneen grows convinced that, while he did not actually witness her and Karim making love, Chanu now knows the whole truth, and her guilt grows almost unbearable. The fourth and most important issue hinges on a word much in play these days: offence. I find this the most worrying aspect of the whole affair because it is symptomatic of deep and far-reaching changes in our political, social and cultural life. The protest organisers say they are offended that a character in the novel - Chanu, Nazneen's husband - says rude things about Sylhetis (Sylhet is a region of Bangladesh). He most certainly does. Here is the passage, early in the book, from which the objectors most often quote: Later, Nazneen takes a train to see Karim to tell him that they need to end their relationship. She has come to understand that she’d pieced his personality together like one would a quilt, making him up out of what she’d hoped he would be. Now the seams are showing, and she knows that they do not have a future together. For the most part, he takes the news well, assuming that she is breaking up with him because she can longer bear the thought of sinning against God.

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Splendid...Daring...Brilliant...Refreshing...A great achievement of the subtlest storytelling' New Republic At the heart of the book lies a marvellous depiction of an adulterous affair. As a good Bengali wife, Nazneen does not enter lightly into her sexual adventure, and her lover, Karim, a fierce young Muslim who wants to radicalise the local community, has deeply held beliefs against promiscuity. But as Karim comes to Nazneen's house day after day, bringing her the piecework for her sewing job, Ali shows how the physical attraction that explodes between them destroys their moral expectations. She captures all the little details of Karim's attractiveness to Nazneen, from the citrus scent of his shirts to his eager energy when discussing politics, until, long before their first kiss, you have been convinced by a sense of absolutely inexorable desire. The writer and activist Germaine Greer expressed support for the campaign, writing in The Guardian: Ali has an impressive command of her story, but her real gift is in the richness of the lives she has created, populating Nazneen's London with a very entertaining cast of comic characters' The Times Nazneen's inauspicious entry into the world, an apparent stillbirth on the hard mud floor of a village hut, imbues in her a sense of fatalism that she carries across continents when she is married off to Chanu, a man old enough to be her father. Nazneen moves to London and, for years, keeps house, cares for her husband, and bears children, just as a girl from the village is supposed to do. But gradually she is transformed by her experience, and begins to question whether fate controls her or whether she has a hand in her own destiny.

It is sometimes said that only writers from ethnic minorities suffer from the authenticity craze, and that white writers are allowed to be artists, not operating under the same strictures. But there is one area, at least, in which this is not true - the fertile terrain of the post-war racial and religious transformation of this country. Think how few white writers have granted themselves permission to write about it. The result is what Hanif Kureishi has described in a recent essay as a curious kind of "literary apartheid". For now, Ali is still able to command attention and readers for her unpredictable fictional creations. In all her novels, the choice of contemporary storylines and focus on the connections between geography, identity and human relationships are strong and compelling themes that mark her out from many lesser imitators. Ali has managed to create and populate a number of diverse fictional landscapes and in so doing has managed the difficult task of distinguishing her artistry from the initial hype that marked the start of her writing career. It is likely that Ali will continue to move on and to surprise, and one is tempted to hope that “her best work is yet to come” ( The Independent, 2011).Media distortion is a part of everyday life. What do you expect? We shrug it off. Perhaps that's all we can do and continue to accept the consequences. In this instance the consequences for the "community leaders" were, as one commentator put it, in "foolishly confirming the prejudices they fear others hold about them". ("This is not a fiction book," one was quoted as saying.) The worrying part is that, in failing to provide a balanced picture, the media veered towards tarring an entire community - wholly unfairly - with the same brush. Ranasinha, Ruvani, "Contemporary Diaspora South Asian Women's Fiction: Gender, Narration and Globalisation": Palgrave Macmillan. The story of her overnight success is well-known. Even before Ali had completed her famous debut she was signed her up, after her publisher had seen only five chapters of her first draft. Granta reiterated this faith in her skill as a novelist, when it based its decision to name her as one of its 'Best of Young British Novelists' in 2003 on just the manuscript. Since this early popular and critical success, Ali has shown an admirable willingness to wrong-foot and surprise her readers, with novels that have often ranged far beyond the limiting canvas of the ‘British multicultural novel’ template that she helped to establish.

As she sits in those meetings, Nazneen first of all burns with silent admiration for Karim and his impressive certainty about his place in life, but gradually she comes to realise that her lover's dreams of Islamic renaissance may turn out to be as flimsy as Chanu's dreams of integration. And so she begins to grow beyond her first love: "She had looked at him and seen only his possibilities. Now she looked again and saw that the disappointments of his life, which would shape him, had yet to happen." What could not be changed must be borne. And since nothing could be changed, everything had to be borne. This principle ruled her life. It was mantra, fettle, and challenge. Gupta, Suman; Tope Omoniyi (2007). The Cultures of Economic Migration. Ashgate Publishing. p.33. ISBN 978-0-8122-4146-4.Nazneen now has two young daughters— Shahana, who obstinately rejects anything having to do with her parent’s Bengali heritage, and Bibi, who tries tirelessly to please everyone. Chanu, who quit his position as a low-level civil servant just before Raqib’s death, drifts in and out of work, accomplishing nothing. One night, he presents Nazneen with a sewing machine. He soon begins bringing her jeans and skirts and dresses to repair. Nazneen works nonstop and Chanu tells her he is carefully saving the money for their eventual trip home to Bangladesh, where he hopes to make a fresh start.

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