Monica Ali

Set in the gritty Tower Hamlets area of East London, Brick Laneis the story of Nazneen, an Asian immigrant girl and how she deals with issues of love, cultural differences and the human spirit. Nazneen is forced into an arranged marriage with a much older man whose expectations of life are miserably low. When they flee the oppression of their Bangladeshi village for a high-rise block in the East End, she finds herself cloistered and dependent on her...

"Yasmin Ghorami is twenty-six, in training to be a doctor (like her Indian-born father) and engaged to the charismatic, upper-class Joe Sangster, whose domineering mother, Helen, is a famous feminist. Though both Yasmin's parents and Joe's mother approve of the marriage, the cultural gulf between them is vast as, it turns out, is the gulf in sexual experience between Yasmin and Joe. The novel opens as Yasmin, her parents and her brother pile into...

Nazneem is a young Bangladeshi woman who arrives in London during the 1980s. She leaves behind her beloved sister and home, for an arranged marriage and a new life. In a loveless marriage to the middle aged Chanu, she feels trapped within the four walls of her flat in East London. She begins to fear that her soul is quietly dying. Meanwhile, her sister Hasina, continues to live a carefree life back in Bangladesh. Nazneen struggles to accept her lifestyle...