When Nazneen is born prematurely in 1967 in rural Bangladesh, her survival is left to fate rather than medical intervention. But, after an anxious silence, she finally splutters into life.
On seeing that she is a girl, her father says: “Never mind. What can you do?” “What could not be changed must be borne,” the adult Nazneen reflects. “And since nothing could be changed, everything had to be borne.”
Fate and freedom are the themes of Brick Lane, Monica Ali’s bestselling 2003 novel, dramatised last year for radio by Tanika Gupta and now released as an audiobook. While Nazneen’s sister, Hasina, elopes to Dhaka with her lover, 18-year-old Nazneen is sent by her father to London to marry Chanu, a 40-year-old with a face “like a frog”. The snobbish Chanu, who claims to be highly educated, is delighted to have landed a bride “from the village” who will be on hand to cut his corns.
Anneika Rose plays Nazneen, capturing her struggle to find her place in a new country with only a few words of English. But her early shyness is replaced by self-possession as she finds her feet and, later, her independence through her work as a seamstress. Zubin Varla is terrific as Chanu, whose outward pomposity masks a discontent with his professional failure and what he sees as his community’s reluctance to integrate. When he gets into debt, his wife becomes the breadwinner and refuses to pay the interest levied by a local loan shark. As the decades pass, Nazneen learns that, despite her inauspicious beginnings, her fate is in her own hands.
• Brick Lane is available via BBC Audio, 1hr 53min
Further listening
Rogues
Patrick Radden Keefe, Picador, 15hr 28min
The New Yorker writer narrates this collectionhis of articles in which he profiles of notorious figures, from the Dutch gangster Wim Holleeder and drug lord El Chapo to Mark Burnett, the producer behind the reality TV behemoth The Apprentice.
The Story of Art Without Men
Katy Hessel, Penguin Audio, 10hr 44min
A corrective to EH Gombrich’s The Story of Art, this 500-year survey focuses on the female painters, sculptors and installation artists routinely overlooked by art historians. Read by the author.
