Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Brick Lane
    Unavailable
    Brick Lane
    Unavailable
    Brick Lane
    Audiobook (abridged)6 hours

    Brick Lane

    Written by Monica Ali

    Narrated by Ayesha Dharker

    5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    This exciting and deeply moving debut novel follows the tumultuous life of Nazneen from her birth in a Bangladeshi village hut, to her arranged marriage to Chanu and the subsequent move to London’s Tower Hamlets

    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,’ say 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; he opens her eyes and directs her gaze – but what she sees, in the end, comes as a suprise to them both.

    While Nazneen journeys along her path of self-realization, 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 and, by turns, both comic and deeply moving, Brick Lane establishes Monica Ali as one of the most exciting new voices in fiction.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 15, 2005
    ISBN9780007219520
    Unavailable
    Brick Lane
    Author

    Monica Ali

    Monica Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and grew up in England. She was named one of the 20 best young British novelists under 40 by Granta. She is the author of four previous novels, including Untold Story and Brick Lane, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Guardian Book Prize, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was named a winner of the 2003 Discover Award for Fiction and a New York Times Editors’ Choice Book that same year. She lives in London with her husband and two children.

    More audiobooks from Monica Ali

    Related to Brick Lane

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Cherie Jones

      Jan 7, 2021

      Cherie Jones
      3 min read

    • Article

      Things Fall Apart: On Ali Smith’s ‘Autumn’ and ‘Winter’

      Jan 16, 2018

      It’s a care, a real care, when a writer whose work you love takes on a project like a seasonal quartet. The potential for readerly woe is plain: four novels forced into a form already replete with corny allegories and tired themes. Ali Smith begins h

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Equality of Shame: On ‘The Heart’s Invisible Furies’ by John Boyne

      Aug 30, 2017

      With intricate, narrative precision, The Heart’s Invisible Furies cuts to the heart of what family is, how it is chosen, and how it endures. The post The Equality of Shame: On ‘The Heart’s Invisible Furies’ by John Boyne appeared fi

      4 min read

    • Article

      Mbuze

      Oct 29, 2021

      Mbuze
      11 min read

    • Article

      Why My Nana Buried Her Sofa

      Feb 6, 2019

      I had my story ready for when Mommy picked me up tomorrow from my Nana’s house: Two hours of Maths revision, an afternoon nap, then two hours studying history. But Nana hadn’t got the memo. Or she had but didn’t care. We were standing in the sunshine

      7 min read

    • Article

      Bhanu Kapil

      Mar 15, 2019

      Everything is red. The trees look like they’re bending over. The lorry is approaching the village. Nurpur. Don’t tell anyone it was Nurpur. Just say it was any old village. A motorbike was coming from the opposite direction. The driver of the motorbi

      5 min read

    • Article

      Lucy’s Tall Order

      Feb 8, 2022

      Lucy’s Tall Order
      6 min read

    • Article

      The INVISIBLE RED STRING

      Feb 1, 2023

      The INVISIBLE RED STRING
      10 min read

    • Article

      Alien Mark

      Sep 1, 2017

      Alien Mark
      9 min read

    • Article

      Choosing the Flowers

      Oct 10, 2022

      Choosing the Flowers
      10 min read

    • Article

      Winds Of Change

      Dec 10, 2019

      “Till the end of the pitted and dusty lane, she was a dry, brown leaf swiftly floating down a clear stream. Part of it was easy, the part about being brown. ‘Brown as mud and common as mud,’ Aaji would scream every morning waking her up. The rest of

      9 min read

    • Article

      Princess Bari

      Apr 15, 2019

      Princess Bari
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Kitchen, A Sunroom, And A Thousand Days

      Aug 5, 2019

      I was young, maybe 8 or 9. My mother was going through a time: The couple she cleaned for and whom we lived with had broken up and left us lingering in their abandoned home. She had cancer, my mother, so her head was where it was, but sometimes she w

      3 min read

    • Article

      Count Your Chickens

      Mar 5, 2018

      Count Your Chickens
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Good Mutton Curry

      May 20, 2021

      A Good Mutton Curry
      6 min read

    • Article

      Lucky Were the Bodies

      May 3, 2022

      Lucky Were the Bodies
      8 min read

    • Article

      For The LOVE Of BOOKS

      Sep 1, 2019

      Houshang Moradi Kermani is one of Iran’s most famous writers. This story is from The Tales of Majid, a collection of stories about a boy named Majid who is raised by his grandmother, Bibi, in the rural Iran of sixty years ago. MASH ASSADOLLAH WAS th

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Family Plot

      May 7, 2020

      The Family Plot
      10 min read

    • Article

      GRIEF In The Time Of COVID

      Nov 24, 2021

      GRIEF In The Time Of COVID
      4 min read

    • Article

      Nan’s ADVENTURE

      Aug 23, 2023

      Nan and I had always been close, so I felt sad when she needed to go into a nursing home. She had been an independent woman all her life, but she’d had a few nasty falls and was finding self-care challenging. When I went to visit her the first weeken

      2 min read

    • Article

      Nan’s ADVENTURE

      Aug 23, 2023

      Nan and I had always been close, so I felt sad when she needed to go into a nursing home. She had been an independent woman all her life, but she’d had a few nasty falls and was finding self-care challenging. When I went to visit her the first weeken

      2 min read

    • Article

      Lost for WORDS

      Aug 2, 2023

      Lost for WORDS
      3 min read

    • Article

      Summer Of Love

      Jun 22, 2022

      Summer Of Love
      15 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Brick Lane

    5/5

    4 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      What a beautiful story. Enjoyed from beginning to end and didn't want it to finish