“An hour and forty-five minutes before Nazneen’s life began–began as it would proceed for quite some time, that is to say uncertainly–her mother, Rupban, felt an iron fist squeeze her belly.”
This is a 2003 novel from the writer Monica Ali, which was nominated and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It lost to a bad book, but I also don’t think it was the best remaining book.
Anyway! The novel begins with Nazneen, a Bengali woman living in Dhaka. She finds out that her father has promised her to an older man living in London named Chanu. She’s terrified of course for lots of reasons–including she doesn’t speak English, she’s so much younger than her promised husband, and she doesn’t want to live so far from home. But of course she goes.
When she’s there, it’s not fair to say all her nightmares come true and of course it’s not fair to say all her dreams come true. Instead, she starts a life, has children, has tragedies, learns the ways of the new world, finds reasons to both love and detest her husband, and finds out just the ways in which her new country treats people like her — in conflicted ways! What stands out to me about this novel is how enclosed it feels for such a long time and how much that opens up more as Nazneen acclimates to her new life. There’s a near Dickensian set of eclectic characters — with enemies both small and large, but the scope is not Dickensian.
