Published 2003 / Length 492 pages
An enjoyable and inspiring read, Brick Lane contains a potpourri of archetypal modern characters caught in a morass of angst and alienation. Nazneen is an eighteen-year-old woman wrenched from her family and the relative security of her Bangladeshi village to be married off to a man old enough to be her father, and forced to live in London, a place she doesn’t know. Chanu, her husband, a man who came to Britain expecting to get on if he worked and studied hard, has learned the hard way that Britain isn’t quite the land of golden opportunity it appeared to be from Bangladesh. For years, Nazneen keeps house, looks after her husband, bears his children and dutifully maintains her horizons within her home and family. When reality finally dawns on Chanu, with it comes the realization that he cannot earn enough to support his family. Suddenly, Nazneen’s world broadens, and with the purchase of a second-hand sewing machine and an introduction to Karim, a young second-generation British-Bangladeshi, her life changes for ever.
‘Ali lifts the lid on contemporary immigrant life in modern urban Britain. It’s both surprising and heart-warming and gives a real sense of the fractured identities that so many immigrant people and especially their children are trying to forge into a coherent whole. Excellent.’ – MIKE, 37
• How successful is Ali at conveying the alienation felt by her characters, both towards each other and within the society in which they find themselves?
• For what audience is this book primarily written? Do you think it helps to foster better understanding and respect between indigenous and immigrant people?
• How is hypocrisy handled in the book? In particular, what do you make of Mrs Islam?
• Does the backdrop of escalating racial tension add to or get in the way of the other narratives?
• Should Western attitudes towards women and women’s rights be overlaid on to different cultures, as here? Should we even ask that question?
• In 2004, Ali won the British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year and Brick Lane won the WH Smith People’s Choice Award for Debut Novel. The book was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Guardian First Book Award and the British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award.
• In 2003, Granta magazine named Ali as one of its twenty Best of Young British Novelists.
• Straightening Ali by AMJEED KABIL – a young British-born Pakistani man is forced into an arranged marriage by his family, even though they know he is gay.
• The Buddha of Suburbia by HANIF KUREISHI – Karim, a young English-Asian man living with his English mother and Indian father in south London, tries to find his own identity.
• Small Island by ANDREA LEVY (see here) – a Jamaican couple are befriended by their white landlady in post-war Britain, when to be black was to be a second-class citizen.