Brick Lane - Monica Ali

The Blurb At the tender age of 18 Nazneen's life is turned upside down. After an arranged marriage to a man 20 years her elder she exchanges her Bangladeshi village 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 har husband. A man of inflated ideas (and stomach), he sorely tests her compliannce. But Nazneen submits, as she must to fate and devotes her life to raising her family and slapping down her demons of discontent. Until she becomes aware of a young radical, Karim. Against a background of escaltting racial ...

After hearing about this book being made into a movie I thought I would head down to my local bookshop and check it out. People who know me will know that I will always read a book before seeing the movie if possible, as I think in most cases the book is always better. Brick Lane is essentially a story of life in the area of London known as Tower Hamlets in 1985. The main character of the story is Nazneen who at 18 is sent over to England from Bangladesh to be part of an arranged marriage to a man called Chanu who is twenty years her senior. The book shows you how Nazneen's life's changes and evolves with the passing of time and how her life in England begins ...

Story Without giving too much detail away about this book, it is the story of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi girl that nearly dies at birth, when her mother chose to let Fate decide her future. Nazneen's mother seemed to teach her to accept her Fate, to 'endure', yet this she struggled to do herself, often in tears & eventually heading for a tragic end. Nazneen is left confused by her mother's strange ways, possibly damaged by the very way she entered the world herself & having to accept that her mother could not endure her Fate. Still, she does her best when she leaves behind her family & the life she knew & is sent to London to marry a man much older ...