This highly evolved, accomplished book is a reminder of how exhilarating novels can be: it opened up a world whose contours I could recognize, but which I needed Monica Ali to make me understand' Observer Nazneen now has two young daughters— Shahana, who obstinately rejects anything having to do with her parent’s Bengali heritage, and Bibi, who tries tirelessly to please everyone. Chanu, who quit his position as a low-level civil servant just before Raqib’s death, drifts in and out of work, accomplishing nothing. One night, he presents Nazneen with a sewing machine. He soon begins bringing her jeans and skirts and dresses to repair. Nazneen works nonstop and Chanu tells her he is carefully saving the money for their eventual trip home to Bangladesh, where he hopes to make a fresh start. Beyond this moving portrait of the domestic world, I cannot think of another novel in which the politics of our times are caught with such easy vividness. So many novelists either ignore politics altogether, or else they treat politics as journalists do, by making arguments rather than creating situations. But here, everything political that the characters say or do seems to spring from their own hopes and disappointments, so that - even when they are reacting to September 11 or the Oldham riots - it never feels as if Ali is simply using them to illustrate a point. Particularly impressive are the precisely observed descriptions of the meetings of Karim's group of local Muslims, the "Bengal Tigers", where girls in headscarves and boys in Nike fleeces argue about whether they should engage with global jihad or local injustices. Time passes and Nazneen and Razia have their own sewing business. Nazneen hears regularly from Chanu, who writes to her from Dhaka about his workout routine and eating habits. She has no idea what he is doing for work and he doesn’t say. He calls once a month as well, and during one call, tells Nazneen that Hasina, whom he saw once at James and Lovely’s, has disappeared again. She has run off with Zaid.

On the day the family is supposed to leave for Bangladesh, racially motivated riots break out in their neighborhood. Nazneen is horrified when she learns that her daughter Shahana has run away and might be caught up in the violence. With Karim's help, she is able to find Shahana, and that night Nazneen tells Chanu that she and the children will be remaining in London. Nazneen does not love her husband but is submissive to him for the sake of peace and her two children. Her husband resigns from his job for what he sees as unappreciation for his skills and talents. Nazneen gets a sewing machine from a neighbor to earn money mending jeans for a pound a piece. In 2020, Ali was appointed Patron of Hopscotch Women's Centre, [18] a charity that was originally set up by Save the Children to support ethnic minority families who had come to join their partners in the UK. The organisation became independent in 1998 and continues to empower women and girls to achieve their full potential.All sorts of people take offence at all sorts of things. When Irvine Welsh's junkie novel, Trainspotting, was published, some people in Edinburgh objected to the way it portrayed their city. No one took much notice. The feelings of an offended ethnic minority, though (or rather a tiny minority within a minority) rank more highly. Undoubtedly offering to burn books helps. But there is something more fundamental going on here. The white, middle-class good burghers of Edinburgh can look after themselves, but when offence is taken by the underdog those feelings are valued more highly.

But although she is so good at showing how this desire catches Nazneen unawares, the relationship between Nazneen and her husband isn't given the short shrift that one might expect in such a context. Ali has a deft comic touch, and at first Chanu seems to be not much more than a figure of fun, with his huge belly, his useless certificates for unimpressive qualifications, his crumpled trousers, his deluded ambitions, and the corns on his feet that poor Nazneen has to scrape away night after night. We had a little conversation about the authenticity game. "But I'm an actor," he said, justifiably bemused. Part Irish, part Rwandan, part Greek, he'd be waiting perhaps forever for an authentic role to come up. I asked him if he had any qualms about playing Karim. "I like nothing more than a part that requires attention and care for a milieu outside my explicit experience," he said. I took the answer to be no. He said he hoped to bring to bear Karim's "fragility combined with his vigour". This he accomplishes in a performance that delivers both sensitivity and physical energy. Tannishtha and Christopher weave some sort of magic between them to make their relationship seem inevitable rather than merely credible. At the heart of the book lies a marvellous depiction of an adulterous affair. As a good Bengali wife, Nazneen does not enter lightly into her sexual adventure, and her lover, Karim, a fierce young Muslim who wants to radicalise the local community, has deeply held beliefs against promiscuity. But as Karim comes to Nazneen's house day after day, bringing her the piecework for her sewing job, Ali shows how the physical attraction that explodes between them destroys their moral expectations. She captures all the little details of Karim's attractiveness to Nazneen, from the citrus scent of his shirts to his eager energy when discussing politics, until, long before their first kiss, you have been convinced by a sense of absolutely inexorable desire. While Nazneen journeys along her path of self-realization, her sister, Hasina, 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 not bound, by their landscapes and memories, both sisters struggle to dream -- and live -- beyond the rules prescribed for them. In the second part of the novel Monica Ali continues to evoke, stroke-by-stroke, Nazneen’s growing confidence and subtle transformation from submissive, subordinate wife to someone who has begun to find her voice. She now has two daughters and is more settled into life in London. Conversely, it is Chanu, previously confident and full of grandiose plans, who begins to change and retreat. After failing to be promoted, he finds work as a taxi driver out of sheer necessity. He increasingly uses the internet to gain access to a virtual ‘entire world’. Chanu is drifting into an abyss of disillusionment. He is adamant that his daughters only speak Bengali at home and makes them recite the national anthem of Bangladesh. He begins to manifest signs of the ‘going home syndrome’ to which he has previously been so vehemently opposed. Chanu’s displacement is even more evident when he decides to take his family on a day trip to central London, which despite living in England for over thirty years he has never seen. Chanu’s parameters are not much wider than his wife’s. When a passer-by obligingly takes a photo of the family and then asks where they are from, he states: ‘we are from Bangladesh’. His mind is lodged in the space of his much-yearned-for Bangladesh and he feels little sense of being British.The Observer described Chanu as "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." [4] Geraldine Bedell wrote in The Observer that the "most vivid image of the marriage is of her [Nazneen] cutting her husband's corns, a task she seems required to perform with dreadful regularity. [Her husband] is pompous and kindly, full of plans, none of which ever come to fruition, and then of resentment at Ignorant Types who don't promote him or understand his quotations from Shakespeare or his Open University race, ethnicity and class module." [5]