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The
2005 Award
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Brick Lane by Monica Ali Publishers
of Nominated Editions: |
Nominated by:
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| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors |
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ABOUT
THE BOOK
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| Nazneen's
inauspicious entry to the world, an apparent stillbirth on the hard mud
floor of a Bangladeshi village hut, imbues in her a sense of fatalism that
she carries across continents when she is married off to Chanu. Her life
in London's Tower Hamlets is, on the surface, calm. For years, keeping house
and rearing children, she does what is expected of her. Yet Nazneen walks
a tightrope stretched between her daughters' embarrassment and her husband's
resentments. Chanu calls his elder daughter the little memsahib. 'I didn't
ask to be born here,' says Shahana, with regular finality. Into that fragile peace walks Karim. He sets questions before her, of longing and belonging; he sparks in her a turmoil that reflects the community's own; her opens her eyes and directs her gaze - but what she sees, in the end, comes as a surprise to them both. While Nazneen journeys along her path of self-realisation, a way haunted by her mother's ghost, her sister Hasina, back in Bangladesh, rushes headlong at her life, first making a 'love marriage', then fleeing her violent husband. Woven through the novel, Hasina's letters from Dhaka recount a world of overwhelming adversity. Shaped - yet ultimately not bound - by their landscapes and memories, both sisters struggle to dream themselves out of the rules prescribed for them. Beautifully rendered, Brick Lane is, by turns, comic and deeply moving. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
| Monica Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and grew up in England. She is one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists of the decade. Brick Lane, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the George Orwell Prize for political writing and the prestigious Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Monica Ali lives in London with her husband and two children, and is working on her next novel. |
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