Monica Ali Biography - life, family, children, parents, name, story, mother, young, son - Newsmakers Cumulation Author Monica Ali Born in 1967, in Dhaka, Bangladesh; emigrated to Britain, 1971; daughter of Hatem (a teacher) and Joyce (a counselor) Ali; married Simon Torrance (a management consultant); children: Felix, Shumi (daughter). Education: Earned PPE (philosophy, politics, and economics) degree from Wadham College, Oxford University. Addresses: Home —Dulwich, England. Office —c/o Doubleday (UK), c/o Transworld Publishers, 61-63 Uxbridge Rd., London W5 5SA, England. Career Worked in the marketing department of Pluto (a publishing house); became sales and marketing manager at Verso (a publishing house); also worked for a branding agency; first novel, Brick Lane , published in 2003, and adapted for film, 2007. Awards: Named one of Granta 's Best Young British Novelists, 2003.

Sidelights In 2003, Monica Ali's debut novel Brick Lane won generous accolades for its comic yet heartfelt portrayal of a young Bangladeshi woman and her life in London. Nominated for one of Britain's most coveted literary awards, the first-time author's tale was hailed as "a serious work in the best sense of the term," wrote Nation reviewer Diana Abu-Jaber. "It has weight, purpose and passion." Across the Atlantic, Brick Lane also resonated with critics. "It usually takes two or three books [for a writer] to establish their form," asserted Michael Gorra in the New York Times , "and yet Monica Ali already has a sense of technical assurance and an inborn generosity that cannot be learned. Brick Lane inspires confidence about the career that is to come." Ali was born in 1967 in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, which at the time was known as East Pakistan. Her father, Hatem Ali, was a teacher who had met her British mother, Joyce, while studying in the north of England a few years earlier. Ali's mother returned to Dhaka with him, where they defied the wishes of his family—who had already selected a bride for Hatem—and married.

"People came from miles around to see this white woman," Ali told reporter Lucy Cavendish in the London Evening Standard about her mother's newlywed adventures. "Sometimes she'd have to get up in the middle of the night and get dressed because people had walked for days to meet her." Civil war broke out in East Pakistan in 1971, and this forced Ali's parents to move to England for their safety and that of their four-year-old daughter, who has slim but vivid recollections of this period. "When the Pakistani tanks rolled into Dhaka, and after a number of my father's colleagues had been called to a meeting and shot, we used to sleep out on the balcony at night, fully clothed in case a knock came at the door," Ali replied to a series of readers' interview questions that appeared in London's Independent . The Ali family settled in Bolton, a city in northwest England, but several years had passed since her parents had met, and anti-Asian sentiment was on the rise in Britain.

In the early 1960s, the few southwest Asian residents in England were largely professionals, such as doctors, but intervening years had brought a new influx of poorer immigrants, which raised tensions and prompted the founding of a right-wing anti-immigration party called the National Front. The family struggled on several levels—her father had difficulty finding a job, and so her parents ran a small trinket shop for a time—and they all sensed unease from their English relatives and strangers alike. "I experienced racism," Ali told Cavendish in the Evening Standard . "I had to walk past people carrying National Front signs. I think people have forgotten how insidious it all was." Ali entered Wadham College of Oxford University, and graduated with a PPE degree, the acronym for the philosophy, politics, and economics course. She went to work in the marketing department of a small publishing house and moved on to a similar job at another house before joining a branding agency. During this period she met her future husband, a management consultant named Simon Torrance, and quit work when she became a mother. When her first child, a son they named Felix, was born, Ali decided to join an online shortstory writing group.

She had never tried writing fiction before, but as she told the Observer 's Harriet Lane, "quite quickly I felt a bit constrained by the short-story format, as though I didn't have room to breathe. There was something else that I wanted to do. And then it was a question of getting up the courage." When her mother's father died not long following the arrival of Ali's second child, her daughter Shumi, Ali's grief was compounded by guilt. "I'd been meaning to take Shumi up," she recalled in the interview with Lane, "but it's very difficult to get around to doing things when you've got a toddler and a baby, and by the time we went up there, we were going to his funeral…. There's something galvanizing about a funeral. I felt the need to not put things off any longer." Immediately after the funeral, she and her husband went on vacation, and it was then she began writing Brick Lane . Ali finished two chapters and thought she should get some feedback, and so she passed them along to a friend who worked at a publishing house.

Within days, she was offered a book deal that included a generous advance, some of which she used to pay for childcare while she completed the novel during much of 2002. In the first week of January of 2003—months before Brick Lane was to be officially published—Ali became an overnight sensation when her name appeared on a much-anticipated list of the 20 Best Young British Novelists Under 40, a once-a-decade ranking from the prestigious literary journal Granta . Another member of that list was Zadie Smith, whose award-winning 2000 novel of a Bangladeshi family in London, White Teeth , would be frequently mentioned in reviews of Ali's debut. Previous names on the Granta list included Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Ian McEwan. Brick Lane was published in May of 2003, and was immediately heralded by critics as living up to the Granta judgment. The story's focal point is Nazneen, born in a Bangladeshi village and married off at age 18 to a man several years her senior, who takes her to live in London.

They settle in the South Asian stronghold of London's East End, anchored by the thoroughfare of the title which takes its name from the brickmaking industry that thrived there a century earlier. Nazneen is bewildered by life in London, lonely, and ambivalent about her husband, Chanu, even as her dependence on him grows with the birth of each of their children. The course of the novel spans 13 years, from 1988 to the events that follow 9/11, and Nazneen eventually begins to venture further afield from Brick Lane as the years pass; when she first arrives, she is afraid to even leave the apartment, but eventually meets her neighbors and even takes a job as a seamstress. Through her job she meets a young, charismatic Muslim activist named Karim, and it is only with him that she begins to explore the parts of London a world away from the insular community centered around Brick Lane. Reviews for Brick Lane hailed it as the successor to Smith's White Teeth as well as the debut of a talented new literary voice for twenty-first century Britain.

Commenting on the Granta list, the Nation 's Abu-Jaber asserted that " Brick Lane fulfills that early promise and establishes Ali as a writer of real literary depth and dimension. There is an elegance and a steadfast, patient, careful construction of observed detail to this prose, a meticulous layering of character and social observation that endows Brick Lane with a sophistication and maturity that might surprise readers who've come to expect flash and dash in modern fiction." The novel's only shortcoming, some reviewers felt, was delivering a too-neat wrap-up of the strands of plot between Nazneen, Chanu, and Karim. "Exas- peratingly, Ali's complex and largely deterministic story ends with a discordant postscript of mushy self-fulfillment," noted Atlantic Monthly book critic Benjamin Schwarz. Other assessments found a comic warmth in Ali's characterization of Chanu.

Writing in the Observer , Lane termed him "one of the novel's foremost miracles: twice her age, with a face like a frog … and the boundless doomed optimism of the self-improvement junkie, he is both exasperating and, to the reader at least, enormously loveable." Benedicte Page of Bookseller also commended the portrayal of the husband, calling him "a wonderfully drawn character: pompous and an arch self-deceiver, and yet endearing, with his passion for learning and his endlessly disappointed hopes for self advancement." Brick Lane was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003, given to the best work of fiction in English from an author in Britain, Ireland, or one of the Commonwealth nations. The Booker Prize is considered one of the world's foremost literary honors, and its list of finalists customarily prompts an outpouring of debate in the British media. Ali failed to win, but the success of her debut novel allowed her and her husband to buy a vacation home in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal. Their visits there inspired her next work, Alentejo Blue , published in 2006.

Less a novel than a collection of stories about the denizens of a tavern in the village of Mamarossa, the work is peopled by Portuguese and Britons alike, such as the young village woman who yearns to work in London as an au pair, and the dissolute, caddish British writer who dallies with another Brit and then takes up with the woman's daughter. In the final chapter, the stories come together on the night of the local festa , or day of revelry. Reviewers hoping for a successor to the epic saga of Brick Lane were somewhat puzzled by Ali's follow-up. " Brick Lane 's characters were stifled by their circumstances, compelling the reader to urge them on," remarked Tarquin Hall, writing in the New Statesman. "Alentejo Blue 's main characters (if they can be described as such) are just stifled, and inspire nothing much apart from irritation and indifference." Writing in Entertainment Weekly , Jennifer Reese conceded that "Ali understands her characters—what they want, how they deceive themselves, where they fit into this forlorn corner of the world—with perfect clarity," though she noted that "this scrapbook of a novel never gathers much narrative force.

But it is made of intriguingly beautiful bits and pieces." Ali and Doubleday, her publishing house, sold the film rights to Brick Lane , but when shooting began in the summer of 2006 there was a movement to prevent British director Sarah Gavron and the crew from filming in the actual Brick Lane area of London. Some in the Bangladeshi community claimed that the novel portrayed "Bangla Brits" as backward and uneducated, a stereotype that a planned book-burning ceremony of Ali's acclaimed novel did little to dispel. Local business leaders warned that violence might erupt should the film crew show up, and so the decision was made to shoot the exterior scenes elsewhere. Ali did not comment on the matter, but others did, including novelist Salman Rushdie, who supported her.

In a column that appeared in the Independent , Johann Hari—a resident of Brick Lane himself—remarked that "Ali's crime has been to challenge the supremacy of Bengali men by articulating the secret experiences of Bengali women," and called the dispute part of a recent "cascade of protests by ultraconservatives within Europe's immigrant communities trying to silence women from their own neighbourhoods calling for change." As Ali noted back in 2003, she was surprised at the overall critical reception of her debut novel in general. "I had no idea the book would cause such a fuss," she told Samantha Conti in W . "I kept thinking, Who's going to read a book about a Bangladeshi housewife?" Selected writings Brick Lane , Scribner (New York City), 2003. Alentejo Blue , Scribner, 2006. Interview: Monica Ali | Books | The Guardian The Guardian The Observer Ali's in wonderland When she was voted one the UK's best young novelists Monica Ali's first book was only a manuscript. Now she's being hailed as a new Zadie Smith. Monica Ali: 'there's absolutely no star bullshit about her'.

Photograph: PA The Observer Ali's in wonderland When she was voted one the UK's best young novelists Monica Ali's first book was only a manuscript. Now she's being hailed as a new Zadie Smith. Sunday 1 June 2003 07.07 EDT First published on Sunday 1 June 2003 07.07 EDT Share on Messenger Close Monica Ali hasn't been published yet, but she is already famous. 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. Now Ali is in an unusual, and unusually dangerous, position. The publication of her debut novel tomorrow is something of an event. But it has a lot to prove. Surely, Brick Lane can't be that good? Actually, it's better.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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. The book follows Nazneen and Hasina, living very different lives in very different places, but finally daring to hope that they may have found a similar sort of happiness. The themes are the big ones - identity, self-determination, the freight of family - and they are kept afloat by the buoyancy of Ali's characterisation, which occasionally verges on the Dickensian without ever resorting to caricature. In Nazneen's world, everyone is convincingly governed by their own individual logic. Throughout, one is struck by Ali's ability to shift gracefully from comedy to tragedy and back again. Monica Ali, 35, lives in south London with her husband Simon, a management consultant, and their two children, aged four and two. After PPE at Oxford, she drifted into marketing for two small publishing houses, then worked at a design and branding agency.

Somehow, writing was always idling at the edge of her thoughts. 'On and off I've had an idea that it would be a nice thing to be a writer, which is quite a different thing to having the urge to write. That came quite late,' she says. 'And so did the confidence.' When Felix, her first child, was just under a year old, Ali started to experiment with short stories. One evening on the internet, she found a writing group - 'you'd submit a short story and you'd get an online critique' - which didn't exactly teach her anything new, but gave her the discipline to write a little whenever she could. 'And quite quickly I felt a bit constrained by the short-story format, as though I didn't have room to breathe. There was something else that I wanted to do. And then it was a question of getting up the courage.' The courage finally came when her daughter Shumi was five months old.

It almost looks as if the pram in the hall was a factor in Ali's decision to give the writing a proper shot and she agrees that, in the chaotic upheaval of motherhood, there was a 'pressing necessity' to find a space for herself, even if it was only in front of a blue screen late at night. But the main factor, she thinks, was the death of her maternal grandfather. 'I'd been meaning to take Shumi up, to introduce my grandparents to the baby. But it's very difficult to get around to doing things when you've got a toddler and a baby, and by the time we went up there, we were going to his funeral. The next day, we went on to have a holiday in the Lake District. There's something galvanising about a funeral. I felt the need to not put things off any longer. And I sent my husband outside with the little ones, and I drew the curtains against the sun, and I started then.' Hoping for some constructive advice, she gingerly showed the first two chapters to a friend who was doing an editing stint at Doubleday. By the following Monday, an offer was on the table.

She used part of her advance to fund childcare and so was able to dedicate mornings to the novel, taking 18 months from the first sentence to the final editorial tweak. 'I worked very intensively - I was, you know, obsessed. Anytime that I wasn't looking after the kids, I was working.' Now she is gearing up to start her second. Superstitiously, she won't say much about it. Over lunch at her local, Ali is thoughtful and assured - circumspect, yet more relaxed than your average first-time novelist of whom Great Things are expected. She knows her own worth. This, you assume, is why she won't grumble about the Granta list making her a hostage to fortune. She is confident about the book. 'People have been asking me about the Granta list in a way that makes me think they want me to complain about it,' she says. 'But I'd be a fool to complain about it, and I'm not going to. I'm so well aware what happens with first novels: you're out there, waving a flag, and no one's passing in your direction.' Not all of the advance press has been favourable.

Maya Jaggi, a respected literary journalist commissioned to interview Ali, recently went public about being turned down by Doubleday, apparently on the grounds that Ali, nervous of being ghettoised, had vetoed her. Instead, saying that Ali was keen to be seen as a writer first and a woman and 'coloured person' second, the publicist suggested the paper use an alternative writer, who, unlike Jaggi, was neither female nor Asian. Ali sighs when I raise this. She's not burning to put the record straight, despite the fact that 'although it seems as though I'd been quoted, I hadn't'. No one had consulted her about the interview; the publicity department had made a mistake; her publishers have sent a letter to the paper concerned, clarifying this. That's an end to it, as far as Ali is concerned, and she would really rather talk about something else. I wonder why she isn't more anxious to clear her name for the record. Ali thinks for a minute. 'The thing is, it was a bit of a cock-up. But I don't want to rub anyone's nose in it. I don't want to get hung up on what "people", that nebulous mass, think about me.

That's the way to unhappiness, I think.' She might not have been so sanguine, she supposes, if all this had happened when she was in her twenties. 'Perhaps if I'd been getting this attention 10 years ago when my idea of myself was much more hazy and contingent... I spent most of my twenties wondering who I was. But now my identity is so bound up in my family, really.' If you were going to design the ideal laboratory conditions for creating a novelist, you might well sketch out Ali's own background. Her mother, Joyce, met Hatem, a Bangladeshi student, at a dance in the north of England in the mid-Sixties. ('He arranged to meet her again,' says their daughter, volunteering what's plainly a family joke, 'but he was worried he wouldn't recognise her because all white women looked the same to him.') When Hatem returned to Dhaka, to a job as an inspector of technical colleges, Joyce followed him and they were married, much to the horror of his family who had already lined him up a wife.

Though they had little to do with his family after that, the Alis were content in Dhaka and would have stayed there had the civil war not broken out. They managed, with some difficulty, to return to Bolton. Although Joyce's parents had been happy enough to see their daughter married, they were not so happy to see her return from Dhaka with two children under five and a husband who found it hard to get work. For a long time, the Alis ran a knick-knack shop ('trinkets, jewellery, beads, porcelain figures. All the kind of things you see displayed in windows that have a net curtain raised in the middle'); much later, her father took a history degree, and then started to teach at the Open University, while her mother became a counsellor. 'I think when my mum went off to get married, there weren't many Asians in the area, and the ones that there were tended to be professionals - doctors, things like that. But when she came back, eight years later, there had been a whole wave of immigration, and the social-acceptability stakes had declined dramatically.' Some relative suggested that if the children were dressed carefully, no one 'need know'.

As in Dhaka, there were terrible rows, and suddenly ties were cut. But her English grandparents were prepared, finally, to make some concessions. Ali can remember her grandfather approaching her in the playground at junior school, holding out a big box, a glitter set, 'and I can remember being really worried about whether I was allowed to take it because of this rift. I was aware of its significance'. She took it. Before long, there was a truce. But by this stage, Ali was already very conscious that she was on the far side of two cultures. She doesn't want me to misunderstand, she had lots of friends at school, for instance; it wasn't a case of standing on her own every break, feeling lonely. 'But on the other hand, you know that you're working to fit in, discarding certain things. It does give you a different feeling, a different perspective.' It is not a surprise that she admires Chang-rae Lee and Julie Otsuka: writers, like herself, who explore 'cross-cultural intersections', who describe people on the edge and, by so doing, get to the heart of things. · Brick Lane is published by Doubleday.

To order a copy for £10.99 plus p&p, call the Observer Books Service on 0870 066 7989. Other great debuts Margaret Mitchell: Gone With the Wind (1936) Despite charges of racism, Mitchell, a 36-year-old journalist, sold film rights to David O. Selznick for $50,000. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. Joseph Heller: Catch-22 (1961) The title was originally to be Catch-18, but it was swiftly changed when Leon Uris released Mila 18 just before publication. Martin Amis: The Rachel Papers (1971) Writing was in the genes, but Amis junior still had to prove himself. His debut novel was lauded by critics, and still makes good reading. Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984) Banks's first novel aroused controversy because of its violent content, but was also heralded as a new Scottish voice. Donna Tartt: The Secret History (1992) Tartt disappeared for 10 years after the overwhelming success of her first novel.

Fans were disappointed by The Little Friend when it finally appeared last year. Nicholas Evans: The Horse Whisperer (1997) Film rights were sold for $3 million to Robert Redford's Wildwood Productions before Evans had even finished writing. He reportedly told his wife: 'If I get hit by a truck, don't tell anyone. Put me on ice and hire someone to finish the book.' Zadie Smith: White Teeth (2000) The £250,000 advance has passed into urban myth. It's less well known that the book is stuffed with cameo appear-ances from Smith's contemporaries at Cambridge. Jonathan Heawood Monica Ali - Arts and Entertainment biography Monica Ali Category : Arts and Entertainment Last modified : 2011-10-06 Monica Ali is a British writer of Bangladeshi origin. She is the author of Brick Lane, her debut novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2003. Ali was voted Granta's Best of Young British Novelists on the basis of the unpublished manuscript.

In 2003, Monica Ali's debut novel Brick Lane won generous accolades for its comic yet heartfelt portrayal of a young Bangladeshi woman and her life in London. Nominated for one of Britain's most coveted literary awards, the first-time author's tale was hailed as "a serious work in the best sense of the term," wrote Nation reviewer Diana Abu-Jaber. "It has weight, purpose and passion." Across the Atlantic, Brick Lane also resonated with critics. "It usually takes two or three books [for a writer] to establish their form," asserted Michael Gorra in the New York Times , "and yet Monica Ali already has a sense of technical assurance and an inborn generosity that cannot be learned. Brick Lane inspires confidence about the career that is to come." Ali was born in 1967 in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, which at the time was known as East Pakistan. Her father, Hatem Ali, was a teacher who had met her British mother, Joyce, while studying in the north of England a few years earlier. Ali's mother returned to Dhaka with him, where they defied the wishes of his family-who had already selected a bride for Hatem-and married.

"People came from miles around to see this white woman," Ali told reporter Lucy Cavendish in the London Evening Standard about her mother's newlywed adventures. "Sometimes she'd have to get up in the middle of the night and get dressed because people had walked for days to meet her." Civil war broke out in East Pakistan in 1971, and this forced Ali's parents to move to England for their safety and that of their four-year-old daughter, who has slim but vivid recollections of this period. "When the Pakistani tanks rolled into Dhaka, and after a number of my father's colleagues had been called to a meeting and shot, we used to sleep out on the balcony at night, fully clothed in case a knock came at the door," Ali replied to a series of readers' interview questions that appeared in London's Independent . The Ali family settled in Bolton, a city in northwest England, but several years had passed since her parents had met, and anti-Asian sentiment was on the rise in Britain.

In the early 1960s, the few southwest Asian residents in England were largely professionals, such as doctors, but intervening years had brought a new influx of poorer immigrants, which raised tensions and prompted the founding of a right-wing anti-immigration party called the National Front. The family struggled on several levels-her father had difficulty finding a job, and so her parents ran a small trinket shop for a time-and they all sensed unease from their English relatives and strangers alike. "I experienced racism," Ali told Cavendish in the Evening Standard . "I had to walk past people carrying National Front signs. I think people have forgotten how insidious it all was." Ali entered Wadham College of Oxford University, and graduated with a PPE degree, the acronym for the philosophy, politics, and economics course. She went to work in the marketing department of a small publishing house and moved on to a similar job at another house before joining a branding agency. During this period she met her future husband, a management consultant named Simon Torrance, and quit work when she became a mother. When her first child, a son they named Felix, was born, Ali decided to join an online shortstory writing group.

She had never tried writing fiction before, but as she told the Observer 's Harriet Lane, "quite quickly I felt a bit constrained by the short-story format, as though I didn't have room to breathe. There was something else that I wanted to do. And then it was a question of getting up the courage." When her mother's father died not long following the arrival of Ali's second child, her daughter Shumi, Ali's grief was compounded by guilt. "I'd been meaning to take Shumi up," she recalled in the interview with Lane, "but it's very difficult to get around to doing things when you've got a toddler and a baby, and by the time we went up there, we were going to his funeral . There's something galvanizing about a funeral. I felt the need to not put things off any longer." Immediately after the funeral, she and her husband went on vacation, and it was then she began writing Brick Lane . Ali finished two chapters and thought she should get some feedback, and so she passed them along to a friend who worked at a publishing house.

Within days, she was offered a book deal that included a generous advance, some of which she used to pay for childcare while she completed the novel during much of 2002. In the first week of January of 2003-months before Brick Lane was to be officially published-Ali became an overnight sensation when her name appeared on a much-anticipated list of the 20 Best Young British Novelists Under 40, a once-a-decade ranking from the prestigious literary journal Granta . Another member of that list was Zadie Smith, whose award-winning 2000 novel of a Bangladeshi family in London, White Teeth , would be frequently mentioned in reviews of Ali's debut. Previous names on the Granta list included Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Ian McEwan. Brick Lane was published in May of 2003, and was immediately heralded by critics as living up to the Granta judgment. The story's focal point is Nazneen, born in a Bangladeshi village and married off at age 18 to a man several years her senior, who takes her to live in London.

They settle in the South Asian stronghold of London's East End, anchored by the thoroughfare of the title which takes its name from the brickmaking industry that thrived there a century earlier. Nazneen is bewildered by life in London, lonely, and ambivalent about her husband, Chanu, even as her dependence on him grows with the birth of each of their children. The course of the novel spans 13 years, from 1988 to the events that follow 9/11, and Nazneen eventually begins to venture further afield from Brick Lane as the years pass; when she first arrives, she is afraid to even leave the apartment, but eventually meets her neighbors and even takes a job as a seamstress. Through her job she meets a young, charismatic Muslim activist named Karim, and it is only with him that she begins to explore the parts of London a world away from the insular community centered around Brick Lane. Reviews for Brick Lane hailed it as the successor to Smith's White Teeth as well as the debut of a talented new literary voice for twenty-first century Britain.

Commenting on the Granta list, the Nation 's Abu-Jaber asserted that " Brick Lane fulfills that early promise and establishes Ali as a writer of real literary depth and dimension. There is an elegance and a steadfast, patient, careful construction of observed detail to this prose, a meticulous layering of character and social observation that endows Brick Lane with a sophistication and maturity that might surprise readers who've come to expect flash and dash in modern fiction." The novel's only shortcoming, some reviewers felt, was delivering a too-neat wrap-up of the strands of plot between Nazneen, Chanu, and Karim. "Exas- peratingly, Ali's complex and largely deterministic story ends with a discordant postscript of mushy self-fulfillment," noted Atlantic Monthly book critic Benjamin Schwarz. Other assessments found a comic warmth in Ali's characterization of Chanu.

Writing in the Observer , Lane termed him "one of the novel's foremost miracles: twice her age, with a face like a frog and the boundless doomed optimism of the self-improvement junkie, he is both exasperating and, to the reader at least, enormously loveable." Benedicte Page of Bookseller also commended the portrayal of the husband, calling him "a wonderfully drawn character: pompous and an arch self-deceiver, and yet endearing, with his passion for learning and his endlessly disappointed hopes for self-advancement." Brick Lane was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003, given to the best work of fiction in English from an author in Britain, Ireland, or one of the Commonwealth nations. The Booker Prize is considered one of the world's foremost literary honors, and its list of finalists customarily prompts an outpouring of debate in the British media. Ali failed to win, but the success of her debut novel allowed her and her husband to buy a vacation home in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal. Their visits there inspired her next work, Alentejo Blue , published in 2006.

Less a novel than a collection of stories about the denizens of a tavern in the village of Mamarossa, the work is peopled by Portuguese and Britons alike, such as the young village woman who yearns to work in London as an au pair, and the dissolute, caddish British writer who dallies with another Brit and then takes up with the woman's daughter. In the final chapter, the stories come together on the night of the local festa , or day of revelry. Reviewers hoping for a successor to the epic saga of Brick Lane were somewhat puzzled by Ali's follow-up. "Brick Lane 's characters were stifled by their circumstances, compelling the reader to urge them on," remarked Tarquin Hall, writing in the New Statesman. "Alentejo Blue 's main characters (if they can be described as such) are just stifled, and inspire nothing much apart from irritation and indifference." Writing in Entertainment Weekly , Jennifer Reese conceded that "Ali understands her characters-what they want, how they deceive themselves, where they fit into this forlorn corner of the world-with perfect clarity," though she noted that "this scrapbook of a novel never gathers much narrative force.

But it is made of intriguingly beautiful bits and pieces." Ali and Doubleday, her publishing house, sold the film rights to Brick Lane , but when shooting began in the summer of 2006 there was a movement to prevent British director Sarah Gavron and the crew from filming in the actual Brick Lane area of London. Some in the Bangladeshi community claimed that the novel portrayed "Bangla Brits" as backward and uneducated, a stereotype that a planned book-burning ceremony of Ali's acclaimed novel did little to dispel. Local business leaders warned that violence might erupt should the film crew show up, and so the decision was made to shoot the exterior scenes elsewhere. Ali did not comment on the matter, but others did, including novelist Salman Rushdie, who supported her.

In a column that appeared in the Independent , Johann Hari-a resident of Brick Lane himself-remarked that "Ali's crime has been to challenge the supremacy of Bengali men by articulating the secret experiences of Bengali women," and called the dispute part of a recent "cascade of protests by ultraconservatives within Europe's immigrant communities trying to silence women from their own neighborhoods calling for change." As Ali noted back in 2003, she was surprised at the overall critical reception of her debut novel in general. "I had no idea the book would cause such a fuss," she told Samantha Conti in W. "I kept thinking, Who's going to read a book about a Bangladeshi housewife?" View the full website biography of Monica Ali . Monica Ali Monica Ali Monica Ali (1967- ), the daughter of English and Bangladeshi parents, came to England aged three years old. She is best known for her debut novel, the controversial Brick Lane (2003), set in Tower Hamlets in the East End of London. Her second novel, Alentejo Blue (2006), is set in Portugal. Nazneen comes to England as an 18-year-old from Bangladesh.

An arranged marriage, forced rape by any other name. Not long after she arrives in England, the daughter of a neighbour, a 16-year-old girl, is shipped out to Bangladesh, another arranged marriage, another forced rape. Nazneen lives in a tower block in Tower Hamlets, a dismal place, knows only a few words of English, is rarely allowed out. Her husband is not a bad man, at least he does not beat her, but it is not who she would have married by choice. This is how Bangladeshis treat women. Or if we are honest, how Islam as practiced, treats women. We learn of the same ill treatment of women in Afghanistan in The Bookseller of Kabul by Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad. Åsne Seierstad is a Westerner, she writes from the outside. Monica Ali is a Bangladeshi, she writes from the inside. But the tale is the same. No matter from what perspective, from what country, it is a shocking treatment of women. The role of women is simple: to provide sexual gratification for the men, to produce children but only of the male variety and to act as an unpaid slave and carry out all the menial tasks.

The Bangladeshis complain of discrimination, racism, of only getting the shit jobs, on the other hand they are allocated housing, often at the expense of the indigenous white folk who are being driven out, get free education, receive free state benefits, none of which they would receive back home in Bangladesh. The tragedy is that few of them are willing to adapt to the Western culture into which they have willingly transported themselves but expect to receive all the benefits. Monica Ali writes in a very simplistic style, almost childlike or that of an illiterate Bangladeshi with only a basic grasp of English. It is though a style that has its own charm. The style is reminiscent of the style Alexander McCall Smith adopts in The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. Brick Lane was published to great controversy, an insider blowing the whistle on the appalling treatment of Bangladeshi women, exposing the bigotry than runs through Bangladeshi society. True to form, there was ritual book burnings, street demonstrations, though not very well supported. When rumour hit the streets there was to be a film of the book and it was to be filmed in Brick Lane, more protests followed. Women were noticeably absent from the protests.

When this was raised with one of the protesters, his response without any hint of irony was: Muslim women are very conservative and they don't feel comfortable coming here. If there was a protest just for the women then they would come. Thus giving truth to what Monica Ali had written. When questioned further, it appeared few, if any, of the protesters had actually read the book! The irony was the Bangladeshis who protested became the self fulfilling caricatures of the very portrayal they were protesting against! In Brick Lane there is an amusing section where the local Muslim radicals form an action group the Bengal Tigers. One could be forgiven for believing the protesters on the streets were extras acting out these scenes. Sadly, because of a few Islamists taking to the streets, Brick Lane was filmed elsewhere in London, not in Brick Lane.

Such was the concern at the crude attempt to censor Monica Ali, that the English branch of PEN, an organisation that defends the right of free speech for writers, issued a statement: Though legitimate protest and expression of views is just fine, English PEN trusts that this time should there be any concerted physical attempt to stop the production - as in the case of the play Behzti in Birmingham - the police, with the full backing of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, will stand squarely behind the film, its author and the right to free imaginative expression. The setting for her second novel is her second home in Portugal, the title of which, Alentejo Blue , refers to the paint used locally on woodwork Monica Ali opposed the British government's attempt to introduce the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, something she writes about in her contribution to Free Expression Is No Offence , a collection of essays published by Penguin (November 2005). She has been nominated or shortlisted for almost every literary award going and managed to win none. Brick Lane have been registered as BookCrossing books. BookCrossing books are released into the wild and their progress tracked through the Internet via a unique Book Crossing ID (BCID).

As children we used to visit Brick Lane and nearby Petticoat Lane. Although it was known to everyone as Petticoat Lane, this was not the real name of the street or the name you'd find on a map. Then it was the Jewish quarter. Loads of clothes shops, which gave the name, though the main interest to us was the street market held on a Sunday. Now there are very few Jews left, the entire area has been taken over by Bangladeshis and the area has become a major tourist attraction for gawking tourists. Synchronicity : I was part way through reading Brick Lane and finishing this web page, when I turned on the radio to find on 'Front Row' (an abysmal arts programme on BBC Radio 4 where you can hear the bottom of the barrel being scraped to fill its allotted hours), a review of the film of Brick Lane . That is if you can call the presenter Mark Lawson and a so-called reviewer spouting pretentious drivel a review. At the end of the week, Brick Lane was to go on general release. The film Brick Lane is fairly representative of the book. A very powerful and moving film, very sad. Stunning photography.

Lovely Indian music, though I guess strictly speaking Bangladeshi music. Quite why Muslim fundamentalist should take exception to the film, though anything that portrays a Bangladeshi woman as a powerful role model with an independent voice is clearly going to be treated as a grave threat in the same way that Muslim extremists have threatened woman in Bangladeshi who are helped by the Grameen Bank. Synchronicity : A year on from reading the novel, whilst I was watching the film, I learnt of a doctor was conned into visiting her parents in Bangladesh under the guise that her mother was ill. She was held prisoner by her family for four months in a crude attempt to force her to marry against her will. On her arrival at her family home, she was manhandled and locked in a room with several people standing guard. She was held in a mental hospital and injected with what she believed to be mood stabilisers and anti-psychotic drugs. She was forced to marry a man against her will. It was only the intervention of the Supreme Court that forced her release.

Jasvinder Sanghera, of campaign group Karma Nirvana , wants to see lessons on forced marriage legislation taught in schools and a national campaign launched on a similar scale to that used against drink driving and wants the practice of forcing someone to marry to be made a specific criminal offence. [see Captive doctor to return to UK , Freed doctor forced into marriage , Court supports forced marriage GP and The fight against forced marriage ] BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Flavors of a New Land Can Leave a Bitter Taste - The New York Times The New York Times Books |BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Flavors of a New Land Can Leave a Bitter Taste Search Books | BOOKS OF THE TIMES BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Flavors of a New Land Can Leave a Bitter Taste By Monica Ali 369 pages. Scribner. $25. As her first novel arrives here, Monica Ali is already a best-selling author in Britain, praised by The Observer in London as ''one of the best novelists of her generation.'' Her ''Brick Lane'' is one of 23 books on the not exactly short list for this year's Man Booker Prize. Ms.

Ali is being celebrated for her limpid portrait of Bangladeshi characters living in London, defining the immigrant experience through the obstacles and conflicts they encounter. Yet her work is much more impressive in the abstract than it is on the page. Although ''Brick Lane'' has invited comparisons with fiction by Zadie Smith and Jhumpa Lahiri, it rarely gives off the same sparks. Instead ''Brick Lane'' unfolds more quietly and prettily, punctuated by inevitable bitter twists. Ms. Ali writes in decorous, painterly fashion about images that tend to be profoundly unsurprising: ''Dark spots moved through the far fields. Men, doing whatever they could in this world.'' When she makes sharper observations, they are expressed in the narrative equivalent of bold-face type. ''A loss of pride,'' says the book's most sympathetic character, ''is a terrible thing.'' This man's name is Chanu, and he first appears as a figure of fun: the tirelessly self-promoting 40-year-old who enters an arranged marriage with an 18-year-old Bangladeshi named Nazneen.

When she arrives in London, Nazneen is naïve about many things -- like the glass fans that turn out to be revolving doors to skyscrapers -- but not about the delusions of her instant husband. She sees the absurdity of his ambition, which has led him to frame any document related to his precious education (''It's just directions to the school, but that's all they gave out'') and to stop at nothing in the name of self-improvement. ''We were most interested in your story, 'A Prince Among Peasants,' but unfortunately it is not suitable for our publication,'' reads Chanu's rejection letter from The Bexleyheath Advertiser. Apparently this is not a publication that specializes in thinly transparent, face-saving fiction. Continue reading the main story But Chanu's efforts persist, as does his mounting resentment of English complacency and condescension. ''These people here are by and large ignorant and know nothing of the Brontës or Thackeray,'' he inveighs.

''These people here didn't know the difference between me, who stepped off an aeroplane with a degree certificate, and the peasants who jumped off the boat possessing only the lice on their heads.'' Advertisement Continue reading the main story As Chanu become more and more aware of the brick wall that he faces in London, Nazneen evolves, too. Despite her extreme passivity, there is a storm raging inside her, as signaled by storm-raging-inside-her imagery. On snow globes: ''When you shook them they were whipped with a white explosion but then, only then, you could imagine the life within.'' Eventually this longing erupts into an affair with a man who is younger, freer and more politically active than the ever more discouraged Chanu. She is of course drawn to this lover ''like a moth to a flame.'' Feminism is as central to ''Brick Lane'' as the tensions within its immigrant community, which increase after the destruction of the World Trade Center fuels smoldering fires. The first time Nazneen wanders through London and says, ''Sorry'' in English is a red-letter day for her self-determination.

''If God had wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men,'' her mother once told her, but now Nazneen has her doubts. As she is toughened by motherhood and loss, she is also immersed in the moral irony of being a sheltered Muslim woman who sews linings for miniskirts. (The family has taken in piecework.) And when her daughters become teenage enough to say, ''Bor-ing'' in the assimilated English manner, she is left to weigh the price of freedom. Letters from her beautiful sister Hasina tell another story of sexism and hardship, especially after Hasina is rumored to be too close to her landlord. ''You getting cheap rent or what?'' Hasina is asked. And someone else tells her: ''Sometime when people see a beautiful thing they want to destroy it.

The thing make them feel ugly so they act ugly.'' With one of the broad strokes that abound in ''Brick Lane,'' Hasina adds: ''He meaning me for the beautiful thing.'' As the wider world intrudes on the studied naïveté of ''Brick Lane'' (someone tells Hasina of ''singer in USA country she call Britainy Spear''), the book moves toward an angry social upheaval that lends it a final sense of consequence. ''The history lessons: they were not, after all, about the past,'' Chanu thinks, as his dreams of a life in England collapse. And when riots erupt on the melting-pot London street of the title, Ms. Ali powerfully observes: ''All the mixed-blood vitality of the street had been drained. Something coursed down the artery, like a bubble in the bloodstream.'' The groundwork for these closing events is evident throughout ''Brick Lane,'' expressed with varying degrees of subtlety and sting.

But it takes a long, lulling buildup before Nazneen truly experiences the forces that will be ''tearing apart her passive soul.'' Meanwhile Nazneen is electrified by new concepts like ice skating, which at various times represents exhilarating freedom, frozen false emotion and finally a new world of possibilities. As she does with many of this book's ideas, Ms. Ali takes that metaphor around the rink for one spin too many. 'Kitchen' philosopher: Monica Ali - StarTribune.com Books 92463719 'Kitchen' philosopher: Monica Ali In her latest novel, author Monica Ali thoughtfully examines a chef's identity crisis and how it mirrors dramatic changes in British society and culture. By Claude Peck Star Tribune March 23, 2011 — 3:39pm Video (02:41) : British novelist Monica Ali reads an excerpt from her newest novel, 'In the Kitchen.' Star Tribune Purchase: Order Reprint NEW YORK - Monica Ali's emergence in 2003 as one of Britain's best and brightest writers occurred suddenly and without warning, like a time-lapse video of a peony bursting into full bloom.

When "Brick Lane," her fiction debut, came out that year, it had been preceded by not so much as a single published short story. Critics went wild. "It may be Ali's first novel," crowed the Sunday Times of London, "but it is written with a wisdom and skill that few authors achieve in a lifetime." In the New Republic, James Wood called "Brick Lane" "a great achievement of the subtlest storytelling," and even invoked the name of Charles Dickens. Ali's lyrical, sweeping story of Nazneen, the Bangladeshi girl sent to London for an arranged marriage to the much-older Chanu, became a bestseller, was translated into more than 20 languages and made into a movie. It was nominated for the Booker Prize in Great Britain, and for a National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States. One imagines the unknown writer's life being transformed by overnight celebrity and wealth. But for Ali, living in London with her husband and two young children, the biggest change financed by the success of "Brick Lane" was some part-time child care. Kelly Guenther, Special to the Star Tribune English author Monica Ali.

Her latest book is " In the Kitchen." "I got three mornings a week -- yeah, it was a huge luxury," Ali said with a laugh. Ali spoke recently at the offices of Scribner, her U.S. publisher. She's living temporarily in New York while teaching in the master's writing program at Columbia University. Ali is a fit and young-looking 42, and wore a big pair of sunglasses atop her head and black suede boots with fringed sides. There were plenty of interviews after "Brick Lane," she said. "Were I interested in a sort of media life, that would have been fairly easy to slip into -- to do columns, and spout off about this and that, but I have no interest in that. I just find it stressful and boring, and of no relevance to my work, which is to sit on my own and write fiction." That dedication led to a second book, "Alentejo Blue," a series of short stories connected by the setting of a village in Portugal. Her third book, "In the Kitchen," is a novel of contemporary England as seen through the eyes of 42-year-old Gabriel Lightfoot, executive chef at a big London hotel restaurant.

Published last year in hardcover, it comes out in paperback this month. (Ali will talk about that novel and her writing as part of Talking Volumes on May 19 at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul.) Small-town boy appears to have it all as a chef in London Gabriel grew up in northwestern England in a fictional textile-mill town called Blantwistle. His career as a chef has taken him far and wide, but when "Kitchen" opens, Gabriel is working long hours at a French restaurant in London's venerable Imperial Hotel, where he oversees immigrant workers from around the world. He and his girlfriend, Charlie, a nightclub singer, have vague thoughts of marriage. His mom has died and his father, a former mill worker, has cancer. Backers, including a member of Parliament and a business tycoon, are poised to help Gabriel open his own restaurant. Cue the monkey wrench. A night porter turns up dead in the restaurant's cellar, some money has been hidden down there, and a mysterious Eastern European girl who may know more than she's telling enters Gabriel's increasingly chaotic life.

"With Gabe, I wanted to write about a man who's in a modern, metropolitan, multicultural environment, and who feels that he is very adept and plugged in and that he knows how the game is played," Ali said. "But when the pressure is really on him, when he's supposed to look inside himself, he sees a bit of a chasm there. I guess that's his identity crisis." Born in Bangladesh, Ali grew up in England, went to Oxford While it may seem that Ali, with a white British mother and a Bangladeshi father, has more in common with Nazneen, her "Brick Lane" protagonist, than with Gabriel, she doesn't agree. "Nazneen's life is very dissimilar to mine, much more dissimilar than Gabe's," Ali said. "She was born and raised in a little Bangladeshi village, and spoke very little English. I grew up in England." Ali's mother met her father when he was a student in England, but she moved to Dhaka, India, to marry him. When Monica was 3, the family moved back to England.

They lived in Bolton, once a busy textile town that is a model for Blantwistle, where Gabriel's family still lives. In her novel, Ali uses the town and its mills ("most have been abandoned or turned into malls or condos or heritage sites") to talk about dramatic shifts in provincial England: the changing economy, globalization, anti-immigrant sentiment and the role of labor. "I spent a couple of weeks in a mill, talking to older white workers about the changes they've seen in their town over the years," Ali said. She found that older townspeople "lamented the days when there used to be a church on every corner, instead of a mosque." Ali's research into food and restaurants was even more extensive. She spent a year interviewing hotel managers, chefs and kitchen workers in five London hotels to gather background for her novel. Brits have become as food-crazed as Americans, she said, following the exploits of celebrity chefs on reality TV shows, in glossy magazines and in those "who's-shagging-who" tabloids. At the end of the process, Ali had reams of research, but it was a 2-inch news clipping that gave her the opening of her novel.

"I came across this story from two years before, about a Ukrainian kitchen porter whose body had been found in the kitchen of the Cafe Royal in Piccadilly in central London on Christmas Day," she said. "He had been living down there secretly to save money for his daughter's education. A tragic story and one that spoke about the huge divide between lives, even lives that can be lived in the same building. That was my way into the book." Kelly Guenther, Star Tribune English author Monica Ali, her latest book is " In the Kitchen". While "Kitchen" is not a whodunit, the death of a low-level restaurant worker is "quite pivotal," Ali said, because "it opens Gabriel up to thinking about some issues. He tries to brush it off as a bureaucratic hassle, but it becomes, for him, a real nightmare." Novels as places to discover 'emotional truths' Despite her dedication to research, and her fondness for writing about current events, from religion and politics to immigration, Ali said that imaginative fiction has always played a crucial role for her.

A voracious reader who left Bolton to attend Oxford, she admires the novels of Dickens, Austen, Tolstoy and George Eliot "because they have an interest in the world beyond the front door." Of the current craze for memoirs, reality TV and "so-called authenticity," Ali said, "I think it's a misunderstanding of how fiction works. It's a kind of detrimental lowering of the culture, to believe that something is better if it's true, if it's factual. For me, the thing that might be truly illuminating is often made up." She cited a nonfiction book and a novel about Hurricane Katrina, both by New Orleans writer Tom Piazza. "The nonfiction was essential for uncovering the lies," she said, "but the fiction was essential in telling the truths about a situation, the emotional truths." As novels take harpoons from every direction (the Internet, the memoir, shrinking attention spans), one could hardly find a more articulate defender of the form than Ali. "What fiction can offer is a different way to look at a situation, a different way to inhabit the world," she said. "It gives you a different understanding.

It doesn't light it up with the bright light of the TV camera; it's more like a candlelight." Claude Peck • 612-673-7977 Watch "Brick Lane" (2007) Free Online Duration: 101 min Brick Lane is a 2007 British drama film directed by Sarah Gavron and adapted from the novel of the same name by the British writer Monica Ali , published in 2003. The screenplay was written by Laura Jones and Abi Morgan . The Indian actress Tannishtha Chatterjee played the lead role of Nazneen.... Show More Brick Lane is a 2007 British drama film directed by Sarah Gavron and adapted from the novel of the same name by the British writer Monica Ali , published in 2003. The screenplay was written by Laura Jones and Abi Morgan . The Indian actress Tannishtha Chatterjee played the lead role of Nazneen. The film had its first public screening at the Telluride Film Festival in the United States. Show Less See All Loading Video...

Published to great acclaim in 2003, Monica Ali's debut novel Brick Lane garnered rapturous reviews and countless award nominations both in the UK and internationally. A sharply observed story about the life of a Bangladeshi immigrant girl who comes to London to marry, it is ultimately a universal story about life, love, cultural difference and the power of the human spirit. On reading the novel, producer Alison Owen was immediately attracted to the story and saw its potential as a film: "I read 'Brick Lane' and I fell in love with it, and enquired about the option straight away. However, it wasn't an easy project and so I didn't follow it up immediately, but it just haunted me for the next couple of months. I kept thinking about it and eventually I just gave into the urge, bought the rights and started putting the package together." Once a first draft of the screenplay had been completed, Owen could see the direction that the project was taking, but realizing that it still needed a lot of work, she thought it... Show More Published to great acclaim in 2003, Monica Ali's debut novel Brick Lane garnered rapturous reviews and countless award nominations both in the UK and internationally.

A sharply observed story about the life of a Bangladeshi immigrant girl who comes to London to marry, it is ultimately a universal story about life, love, cultural difference and the power of the human spirit. On reading the novel, producer Alison Owen was immediately attracted to the story and saw its potential as a film: "I read 'Brick Lane' and I fell in love with it, and enquired about the option straight away. However, it wasn't an easy project and so I didn't follow it up immediately, but it just haunted me for the next couple of months. I kept thinking about it and eventually I just gave into the urge, bought the rights and started putting the package together." Once a first draft of the screenplay had been completed, Owen could see the direction that the project was taking, but realizing that it still needed a lot of work, she thought it a good time to bring a director on board, and approached Sarah Gavron. Explains Owen: "Sarah's a director with extremely strong vision.

We sent her a copy of the script as well as the book, which it turned out she'd already read and was passionate about." Adds Gavron: "I read the draft and thought it showed lots of potential and came on board at that stage. What really appealed to me was Nazneen's journey. The story of a woman finding her place in the world, and ... Show Less

Question: Which London thoroughfare gave its name to a 2003 novel by Monica Ali?
Answer: Brick Lane