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"Yasmin Ghorami is twenty-six, in training to be a doctor (like her Indian-born father) and engaged to the charismatic, upper-class Joe Sangster, whose domineering mother Helen is a famous feminist. Though both Yasmin's parents and Joe's mother approve of the marriage, the cultural gulf between them is vast as, it turns out, is the gulf in sexual experience between Yasmin and Joe. The novel opens as Yasmin, her parents, and her brother pile into their car, packed with Indian food prepared by Yasmin's mother, to go to dinner to meet Joe's mother in her elegant townhouse in one of London's poshest neighborhoods. Contrary to all of Yasmin's fears, her unsophisticated and somewhat flamboyant mother is embraced and celebrated by Helen and her friends"--
Nazneen finds herself married off to a man twice her age and moved to London, where she meets a younger man involved in radical politics and begins to wonder if she has a say in her own destiny.
The New York Times bestseller from one of the most versatile and bold writers of our time—“an astonishing, tightly structured, and lyrically told” novel (People) inspired by Princess Diana. What if Princess Diana hadn’t died? Diana’s life and marriage were fairy tale and nightmare rolled into one. Adored by millions, in her personal life she suffered rejection, heartbreak, and betrayal. Surrounded by glamour and glitz and the constant attention of the press, she fought to carve a meaningful role for herself in helping the needy and dispossessed. Had she lived, what direction would her life have taken? How would she have matured into her forties and beyond? Untold Story is about the nature of celebrity, the meaning of identity, and finding one’s place in the world. Like Diana, the fictional heroine of this novel is both icon and iconoclast. She touches many millions of lives and hearts around the world, sharing the details of her troubled marriage and her eating disorder, and reaching out as has no other royal before her. But she is troubled and on the brink of disaster. Will she ever find peace and happiness, or will the curse of fame be too great?
Drawing on a selection of works from such prominent authors as Monica Ali, Hanif Kureishi, and Zadie Smith, Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Writing offers the first extended exploration of the cultural impact of race and antiracism in Britain through the lens of black British and British Asian literature. With antiracism—the politics of opposing discrimination—increasingly determining racial categorizations and identities, this study traces its influence over the last two decades on individual identities and the wider political debate, including the changing attitudes toward Muslim culture in Britain and the role of Africa as a symbolic focus for black political culture. This volume will be of interest to anyone seeking a better understanding of the nuances of antiracism in Britain.
In this tale of two Muslim sisters Monica Ali explores how they live out their own personal tragedies. One lives in a tower block in London's East End whilst the other lives in a Bangladeshi village.
***As dramatised on BBC Radio Four*** SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE THE SUNDAY TIMES and NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A RICHARD AND JUDY PICK 'Written with a wisdom and skill that few authors attain in a lifetime' SUNDAY TIMES Still in her teenage years, Nazneen finds herself in an arranged marriage with a disappointed older man. Away from her Bangladeshi village, home is now a cramped flat in a high-rise block in London's East End. Nazneen knows not a word of English, and is forced to depend on her husband. Confined in her tiny flat, Nazneen sews furiously for a living, shut away with her buttons and linings - until the radical Karim steps unexpectedly into her life. On a background of ...
Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 3.0, University of Marburg (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: 10008 PS: London in Contemporary Post-Colonial Literature, language: English, abstract: This research paper deals with Monica Ali's first novel Brick Lane, an epic saga about a Bangladeshi family living in London, which explores the British immigration experience. The novel is highly disputed with its most important aspects of identity, belonging and community problems. People who actually live in the estate of Brick Lane feel being patronized by Ali's novel the more or the less. Just to show how critics reacted to Ali ́s maste...
This pioneering book brings together several critical essays on Bangladeshi writers in the English language, both at home and abroad, and interviews with a prominent poet and a novelist. The past years have seen various attempts to conceptualize and debate the tradition of Bangladeshi literature in English. English has been in Bengal, which included the geographical territory that constitutes present-day Bangladesh, since the arrival of Ralph Fitch in 1583, and although Bengalis started experimenting creatively in the language in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the tradition suffered significant setbacks in Bangladesh and remained in semi-muzzled state for various politic...
Monica Ali, nominated for the Man Booker Prize, theLos Angeles TimesBook Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, has written a follow-up toBrick Lanethat will further establish her as one of England's most compelling and original voices.Gabriel L ightfoot is an enterprising man from a northern E ngland mill town, making good in London. As executive chef at the once-splendid Imperial H otel, he is trying to run a tight kitchen. But his integrity, to say nothing of his sanity, is under constant challenge from the competing demands of an exuberant multinational staff, a gimlet-eyed hotel management, and business partners with whom he is secretly planning a move to a restaurant of his...
As a concept that increasingly gains importance in contemporary cultural discourse, authenticity emerges as a site of tearing tensions between the fictional and the real, original and fake, margin and centre, the same and the other. The essays collected in this volume explore this paradoxical nature of authenticity in the context of various media. They give ample proof of the fact that authenticity, which depends on giving the impression of being inherent or natural, found not created, frequently turns out to be the result of a careful aesthetic construction that depends on the use of identifiable techniques with the aim of achieving certain effects for certain reasons.