Brick Lane: By the bestselling author of LOVE MARRIAGE

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The response was bafflement. I remember one critic saying about Untold Story, ‘a curious marriage of author and subject matter’. People would ask ‘Are you trying to get away from something?’ To me the question they really seemed to be asking was ‘Are you trying to get away from brown people? Are you trying to get away from your ethnicity?’” Ali said. Monica Ali's gorgeous first novel is the deeply moving story of one woman, Nazneen, born in a Bangladeshi village and transported to London at age eighteen to enter into an arranged marriage. Already hailed by the London Observer as "one of the most significant British novelists of her generation," Ali has written a stunningly accomplished debut about one outsider's quest to find her voice. 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.

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. It is sometimes said that only writers from ethnic minorities suffer from the authenticity craze, and that white writers are allowed to be artists, not operating under the same strictures. But there is one area, at least, in which this is not true - the fertile terrain of the post-war racial and religious transformation of this country. Think how few white writers have granted themselves permission to write about it. The result is what Hanif Kureishi has described in a recent essay as a curious kind of "literary apartheid". She lives in South London with her husband, Simon Torrance, a management consultant. They have two children, Felix (born 1999) and Shumi (born 2001). In any case, if we were to take the "authenticity" requirement seriously it must apply to everyone equally. What right does Roddy Doyle have to write a novel from the perspective of a woman who suffers domestic abuse when he is not a battered woman? Taken to its logical outcome, men are not "allowed" to write about women, or women about men, and we are left only with memoir and autobiography, for which admittedly there is a strong demand these days, perhaps because nothing else is authentic enough.Ali has an impressive command of her story, but her real gift is in the richness of the lives she has created, populating Nazneen's London with a very entertaining cast of comic characters' The Times 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. With her next novel, Ali returned to the broad ‘condition of England’ sweep and energised migrant environment of her debut. As the title suggests, Into the Kitchen (2009) used the hotel restaurant in central London as one microcosm from which Ali could range broadly over her now familiar themes of national identity, family and belonging. Scenes from this setting are set against the very different world of a northern mill town where the father of Gabriel Lighfoot, the London chef, is living out his last days.

Ranasinha, Ruvani, "Contemporary Diaspora South Asian Women's Fiction: Gender, Narration and Globalisation": Palgrave Macmillan. Bedell, Geraldine (15 June 2003). "Full of East End promise". The Observer . Retrieved 31 May 2005.

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. With only an hour to spare before they were to go to the airport as a family, Nazneen tells Chanu that she is staying behind. He is grieved but understands, just as she understands his reason for going. They hold each other, overwhelmed with sadness. 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.