New Releases by Monica Ali

"Yasmin Ghorami is twenty-six, in training to be a doctor (like her Indian-born father) and engaged to the charismatic, upper-class Joe Sangster, whose domineering mother, Helen, is a famous feminist. Though both Yasmin''s parents and Joe''s mother approve of the marriage, the cultural gulf between them is vast as, it turns out, is the gulf in sexual experience between Yasmin and Joe. The novel opens as Yasmin, her parents and her brother pile into their car, packed with Indian food prepared by Yasmin''s mother, to go to dinner to meet Joe''s mother in her elegant townhouse in one of London''s poshest neighborhoods. Contrary to all of Yasmin''s fears, her unsophisticated and somewhat flamboyant mother is embraced and celebrated by Helen and her friends. Many complications ensue when Yasmin discovers that Joe has had an affair with a co-worker, and Yasmin''s ne''er do well brother is banished from the house by her father, and Yasmin''s mother moves to Helen''s house in protest. Love Marriage is a story of emotionally fraught self-discovery and how the secrets people keep hidden affect their most intimate relationships. Joe hides the exact nature of his promiscuous past; Yasmin''s brother and mother keep a monumental secret from their father; Yasmin has a wildly erotic affair of her own; and the story of her parents'' love marriage proves to be a cover-up for a dark, tragic history. In the wake of extreme upheaval, Yasmin finds herself, and her life, transformed"--

With carefully adapted text, new illustrations, language practise activities and additional online resources, the Penguin Readers series introduces language learners to bestselling authors and compelling content. Titles include popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction. Brick Lane, a Level 6 Reader, is B1+ in the CEFR framework. The longer text is made up of sentences with up to four clauses, introducing future continuous, reported questions, third conditional, was going to and ellipsis. A small number of illustrations support the text. When Nazneen is 18, she marries a much older man and moves from Bangladesh to England to be with her husband. But Brick Lane in London is very different from Nazneen''s village, and she speaks no English. Nazneen must try to look after her family and get used to a new, and very strange, country.

With nationalism and the far right on the rise across Europe and North America, there has never been a more important moment to face up to what we, in Britain, are doing to those who seek sanctuary. Still the UK detains people indefinitely under immigration rules. Bail hearings go unrecorded, people are picked up without notice, individuals feel abandoned in detention centres with no way of knowing when they will be released. In Refugee Tales III we read the stories of people who have been through this process, many of whom have yet to see their cases resolved and who live in fear that at any moment they might be detained again. Poets, novelists and writers have once again collaborated with people who have experienced detention, their tales appearing alongside first-hand accounts by people who themselves have been detained. What we hear in these stories are the realities of the hostile environment, the human costs of a system that disregards rights, that denies freedoms and suspends lives. ‘We hear so many of the wrong words about refugees – ugly, limiting, unimaginative words – that it feels like a gift to find here so many of the right words which allow us to better understand the lives around us, and our own lives too.’ – Kamila Shamsie All profits go to the Gatwick Detainee Welfare Group and Kent Help for Refugees.

She was the most famous woman in the world. She died tragically, too young, in a terrible accident. The world mourned. Monica Ali, the beloved author of Brick Lane, explores the extraordinary question: what if she hadn''t died? Lydia lives in a nondescript town somewhere in the American Midwest. She''s a nice, normal woman - if strikingly beautiful. She lives a nice, normal life: her friends are normal, her job is normal, her hobbies are normal. Her friends and boyfriend adore her. But her past is shrouded in mystery. Who is Lydia? Where does she come from? And why is her English accent so posh? Lydia is a woman with secrets. Extraordinary secrets. She might even be the most famous woman on the planet... a woman whose death the world mourned by millions. Who is she? *~*~* Praise for Untold Story*~*~* ''A beautiful, gripping accomplishment, a treat for the heart and the head, and will be a joy to readers who believe in the possibility that a book can transform your basic sense of life'' Andrew O''Hagan ''A terrific, clever, multi-layered and subtle book (and let''s not forget - hugely entertaining)'' Joanne Harris ''Haunting and intensely readable, this is something between a thriller and a ghost story'' Lady Antonia Fraser ''A startlingly intelligent, perceptive and entertaining piece of fiction. It''s quite brilliant'' Henry Sutton, Daily Mirror ''Thoughtful, compassionate... a suspenseful and gripping read'' Suzi Feay, Financial Times ''Ali''s third-person princess is a very convincing and sympathetic figure... extremely skilfully done'' Tibor Fischer, Observer

This "mesmerizing" (Entertainment Weekly) novel from Booker Prize-shortlisted author Monica Ali brings us into the vivid world of a London restaurant. Gabriel Lightfoot, an enterprising man from a northern English mill town, is making good in London. As executive chef at the once-splendid Imperial Hotel, he aims to run a tight kitchen. Though he’s under constant challenge from the competing demands of an exuberantly multinational staff, a gimlet-eyed hotel management, and business partners with whom he is secretly planning a move to a restaurant of his own, all Gabe’s hard work looks set to pay off. Until, that is, a worker is found dead in the kitchen’s basement. It is a small death, a lonely death—but it is enough to disturb the tenuous balance of Gabe’s life. Enter Lena, an eerily attractive young woman with mysterious ties to the dead man. Under her spell, Gabe makes a decision, the consequences of which strip him naked and change the course of the life he knows—and the future he thought he wanted. With prose that "crackles with verve and vivacity" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) and "a truly Dickensian cast of characters" (The Buffalo News), Ali’s "portrait of a middle-aged Holden Caulfield wandering the streets" (The Plain Dealer) is a sheer pleasure to read.

Nazneen finds herself married off to a man twice her age and moved to London, where she meets a younger man involved in radical politics and begins to wonder if she has a say in her own destiny.

A new collection of short stories set in the Alentejo province of Portugal features a range of colorful characters, linked by a vivid sense of place and time, including Teresa, a beautiful young girl from the village engaged to a suitable man, who yearns to see the world, and Vasco, a café owner who is losing business to the new Internet café down the road. By the author of Brick Lane. Reprint. 60,000 first printing.