Chanu, her windbag husband, is one of the novel's foremost miracles: twice her age, with a face like a frog, a tendency to quote Hume and the boundless doomed optimism of the self-improvement junkie, he is both exasperating and, to the reader at least, enormously loveable. Impressed by its stacking side-tables, patterned wallpaper and framed certificates testifying to her new husband's proficiency in cycling and transcendental philosophy, Nazneen rarely leaves the flat at first, but when she does she observes London with a Martian's perplexed interest. Nazneen has always known that it is pointless to 'kick against fate', unlike her younger sister Hasina, who broke all the rules and ran away from her family for love - an act of rebellion that in time invites the inevitable reproof. At its heart is Nazneen, whose arranged marriage brings her from the dirt tracks and rice fields of rural Bangladesh to Tower Hamlets and a view of dead grass, broken paving stones and net curtains. 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, dreading the last page. Surely, Brick Lane can't be that good?Īctually, it's better. The publication of her debut novel tomorrow is something of an event. Now Ali is in an unusual, and unusually dangerous, position. The books trade has been muttering about her for 18 months or so, intrigued that her generous two-book deal was sewn up on the basis of only a few chapters, and in January she was fast-tracked to the literary frontline when Granta included her on its list of the best young authors after inspecting a manuscript version of her first novel, Brick Lane: a magnificent coup, certainly, but the sort of splashy advance publicity that tempts cold-water reviews. M onica Ali hasn't been published yet, but she is already famous.

Monica ali novels