Recommendations
Books Like Brick Lane
Immigrant women, arranged marriages, and the slow work of self-creation
If Brick Lane moved you — Nazneen's patience, the housing estate, the affair, the long arc from passivity to ice skates — these eight novels explore women finding agency within immigrant life, or the experience of belonging to two worlds at once.
- 1Buy
Small Island
by Andrea Levy
Four perspectives on the arrival of the Windrush generation in 1948 London — Levy's Orange Prize winner is the Caribbean-British counterpart to Brick Lane's South Asian-British one; both novels are about the gap between the Britain that immigrants imagined and the Britain they find, and both use multiple perspectives to show the same London as experienced from radically different social positions
- 2Buy
White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
Two families — one Bangladeshi, one English-Jamaican — navigating identity, history, and London across three generations — Smith's debut shares Brick Lane's Tower Hamlets setting, its Bangladeshi community, and its engagement with the experience of being Muslim and British in the years after 9/11; the two novels together give the most complete portrait of Bangladeshi-British London in contemporary fiction
- 3Buy
The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
Amir fleeing Afghanistan for America and the betrayal he must eventually go back to repair — Hosseini's debut shares Brick Lane's structure of a protagonist who must choose between two worlds, and its portrait of a Muslim immigrant community whose home country is present in every domestic detail; where Nazneen's trajectory is toward agency within Britain, Amir's is toward reckoning with what he left behind
- 4Buy
The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
Twins in Kerala and the forbidden transgression that destroyed their family — Roy's Booker Prize winner shares Brick Lane's preoccupation with the constraints placed on women by community and family, and its sense that the smallest daily decisions carry enormous weight; where Nazneen's transgression is an affair conducted in secret, Roy's twins' transgression is love that crosses caste lines in a society that cannot survive it
- 5Buy
Arranged Marriage
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Stories of Indian women negotiating the expectations of arranged marriage in India and America — Divakaruni's collection is the closest companion to Brick Lane in its subject: women in arranged marriages finding the terms on which they can live; where Ali tells one sustained story, Divakaruni gives the same experience multiple variations and outcomes
- 6Buy
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
by Mohsin Hamid
Changez, a Pakistani man who had everything America offered and chose to leave, telling his story to an American stranger — Hamid's novel is the male complement to Brick Lane: both are about a South Asian protagonist in an English-speaking country in the years around 9/11, facing the question of what belonging means when the political atmosphere makes belonging more conditional
- 7Buy
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
by Jeanette Winterson
Jeanette growing up in a Pentecostal household in northern England and discovering that her sexuality puts her outside the community she was raised in — Winterson's semi-autobiographical debut shares Brick Lane's portrait of a young woman finding herself in conflict with the religious and communal expectations she was raised within; both novels are essentially about the cost and the possibility of self-definition
- 8Buy
The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
Celie writing letters to God and then to her sister, slowly finding a voice and a life — Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is the American counterpart to Brick Lane in its portrait of a woman beginning in total subjection and moving toward agency; where Nazneen's journey is gradual and undramatic, Celie's is operatic, but both novels insist that the most constrained life contains the possibility of transformation
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