Monica Ali's debut novel, Brick Lane, was published in 2003 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name.

Carrying into her adult years a sense of fatalism instilled during her hardscrabble birth, Nazneen finds herself married off to a man twice her age and moved to London, where she begins to wonder if she has a say in her own destiny.