Amanda Craig
Beyond Brick Lane
Monica Ali enjoyed considerable success with her debut, Brick Lane, which rode high on the current interest in discovering more about the private life of recent British immigrants, specifically those from Bangladesh. Publishers looking for the next Zadie Smith hyped it to the skies, and many found the story of Nazneen – brought to live in Tower Hamlets as the dependent wife of a fat, ugly man, from whom she eventually escapes in a torrid love affair – to be, in the words of one critic, ‘written with a wisdom and skill that few authors attain in a lifetime’.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Amis clearly belongs to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do school of pedagogy. More or less everything he says is demonstrably contradicted by elements of his own work, be they here or elsewhere.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-without-a-hitch
'The bar is set high at the outset, and readers are primed to wonder if Mikhail can make his case.'
Does Alan Mikhail's new life of the Sultan Selim I really overturn 'shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium'? Caroline Finkel investigates.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3
'Shopkeepers even cut out their names from shop paper bags and pasted them onto their books’ endpapers to feign wealth and gain cultural capital, as seen in a book owned by William Straw, a grocer.'
@laurenohagan91 on the Edwardian bookplate fashion.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/stepping-up-to-the-bookplate