Monica Ali caused a worldwide literary sensation with her debut novel, Brick Lane, now a major film. Nineteen-year-old Nazneen exchanges her Bangladeshi village home for a block of flats in London’s East End following her arranged marriage to a man twenty years older than her. She struggles to adjust to this new world, where poor people are fat and dogs go on diets – and to do her duty to her infuriating husband, a man of inflated ideas (and stomach). She submits to this unsatisfactory life, as she must, raising children and slapping down her demons of discontent, until Karim, a young radical, enters her life. Against a background of escalating racial and gang conflict, they begin an affair that changes everything.