Even more than her home village’s natural beauty, Nazneen misses her deceased mother, Rupban, a saintly, long-suffering woman whom Nazneen idolized as a girl for her piety and patience. Having grown up in the small rural village of Gouripur where water buffalo and mynah birds were a regular part of daily life, Nazneen’s new reality in London in the low-income Tower Hamlets housing project is, at first, one of urban ugliness, isolation, and alienation. Cut off from family and everything dear and familiar, she lives like a displaced person, unseen and unseeing. In London, Nazneen struggles not only with bouts of crippling homesickness and a longing for her sister but a palpable loss of self. Brick Lane by Monica Ali is the story of Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi woman who moves to London following her arranged marriage to a much older man, and her sister, Hasina, whose life in Bangladesh, chronicled in letters to Nazneen, is one of instability, hard work, and heartbreak.
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