Brick Lane - Tapa dura

Set in Tower Hamlets, this contemporary novel of the life of an Asian immigrant girl draws the reader into a highly affecting world of love, fate and cultural conflict. Still in her teenage years, Nazneen finds herself in an arranged marriage with a disappointed man who is 20 years older. Away from the mud and heat of her Bangladeshi village, home is now a cramped flat in a high-rise block in London's East End. Nazneen knows no English, and is forced to depend on her husband. But unlike him she is practical and wise, and befriends a fellow Asian girl Razia, who helps her understand the strange ways of her adopted home. A resonant drama from a fierce new literary talent; Monica Ali is a name to watch.

'Focusing on a cross-section of the Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets, a community all but invisible to the rest of London, Ali's novel is warm, shrewd, startling, and hugely readable; the sort of book you race through greedily.' OBSERVER