She was brought up in Lancashire and is Oxbridge educated and has no personal links to the Brick Lane area. Ali’s parentage is half Bangladeshi and half English. It could be argued that Ali’s lack of grassroots knowledge of the Sylheti community has an impact on the characters’ authenticity. In interviews, Monica Ali has spoken of the fact she has no specific sense of home - something shared by her principal character in Brick Lane, Nazneen, who struggles to adapt to London life. Stuck in a traffic jam in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh and the city of Ali’s birth, I was surprised to see street vendors touting pirated copies of the book, shouting ‘B –rick L-ane’ for everyone to hear as they waved them enthusiastically in the dusty air. Monica Ali’s book met stern disapproval in Bangladesh, but found a readership there all the same. Filming in the Brick Lane area had to be clandestine. Sections of the Sylheti community were affronted by Ali’s depiction of them as insular, backward, conservative and uneducated. Both the book and the film caused controversy. If you visit Sylhet, one of the first things you see driving from the airport into the main town is a massive billboard advertising Taj Stores on Brick Lane – a bizarrely surreal sight and a clear sign that Brick Lane is famous globally as well as locally.īrick Lane was adapted for the big screen in 2007. These often eerily quiet estates are home to thousands of Bangladeshis, primarily from the region of Sylhet – a once poor rural district that has become relatively affluent through remittances from British Bangladeshis. Instead she writes about the Bangladeshi community which now predominates – Brick Lane has a rich migrant heritage dating from the French Huguenots and encompassing the Irish, the Jews and more recently the Bangladeshis, who came to London in the fifties and sixties in search of that elusive ‘better life’ – and hones in on the ghettoised council estates that loom tall like chunky limbs on splinter streets.

Monica Ali’s seminal novel, in spite of its title, is not about Brick Lane itself, and has little to say about the commercialised or hip aspects of the locality. Louis-Ferdinand Celine: Guignol's Band I & II

John Sommerfield: Trouble in Porter Street Pamela Hansford Johnson: This Bed Thy Centre

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