I don't know why they do it but they do it a lot - on the title page it says 
 Brick Lane : A Novel 
 And there I was expecting this oblong of printed material to be 
 Brick Lane : A New Kind of Vacuum Cleaner 
 Anyway. Other reviews would have you believe that this book is terrifically boring, beaten only for tediousness by Some Variations in the Major Groups of Plankton of the Kamchatka Peninsula Littoral by R.K. Litkynshovskaya and P.I. Podgorna-Bialaczczka. So why did I really enjoy this novel? Could it be that after a while I accepted my fate in the same way our heroine accepts hers, and my heart, like hers, fluttered when the slightest thing out of the ordinary happened? Or maybe I'm a Samuel Beckett fan and don't realise it. It's very true I do love the music of Steve Reich, which could never be described as dramatic, and indeed has often been compared to Some Variations in the Major Groups of Plankton of the Kamchatka Peninsula Littoral. But really I think I prefer the company of Nazneen and her very aggravating husband Chanu over, say, Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal any day of the week. Not to mention most of my work colleagues and family members. Of course it may be true that should Monica Ali choose to write a graceful and compassionate novel about any of that rabble, I'd be glued to that too.