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 daughter’s embarrassment and her husbands resentments.

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 surprises to them both.

Back in Bangladesh, 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 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.

Read by Ayesha Dharker.

6 hours 10 mins on 5 CDs/ 4 cassettes