Why I recommend Brick Lane to anyone from Bangladesh living abroad

A girl from a village in Bangladesh gets married off to an older man in London and watches the world from a council flat. My aunt lived something very close to this in Tower Hamlets, and she was the one who gave it to me.

Some people in the community objected strongly to how it shows them, and I think that debate is fair to have. But the slow way Nazneen starts to want things for herself, after a lifetime of being told to wait for fate, felt true to me.