THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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.