Finding delight in E2

When I finished the last page of Brick Lane and closed the book, I blew it a grateful kiss. This isn't what I normally do when I finish reading a book, even a very good one, but for 400 pages I had been surfing a sea of delight and Monica Ali had managed to bring my journey to a pitch-perfect conclusion. If she had been standing in front of me I would have kissed her, too.

When I was a young reporter I spent six weeks investigating the struggles, hopes and homesickness of the Bangladeshi community which was settling and growing in Brick Lane. One day I found myself in a bare flat inhabited by a young girl, brought from a Sylheti village to marry a much older man.

Her husband talked to me but she spoke no English, as hardly any of the women did, and all I could do was look at her and wonder about the truth of her life. Now I know. She was Nazneen, Monica Ali's heroine, and she and her community have found a writer who has understood every layer of her heart and mind.

The joy of this book is its marriage of a wonderful writer with a fresh, rich and hidden world. Her achievement is huge. She has taken it on herself to see the world through the eyes of a woman who, for a large part of the book, hardly leaves her kitchen.

She does this with such a feel for texture, such an eye for the intimate, telling detail, such an affectionate understanding of each and every character and, best of all, with such perceptive humour, that she has made Brick Lane one of those all-encompassing reads that you put down reluctantly and rush back to as soon as you can. Nazneen was born to be a victim of fate. She hardly survived her own birth in her Bangladeshi village and her mother committed suicide, convinced that to be born a woman was to be a victim.

She was given in marriage to a London Bangladeshi, Chanu, an incompetent and dreamily deluded husband but a magnificently and lovingly drawn character.

This book is about love as much as anything, about the daily tolerances and forgivenesses that can flower in an inescapable situation and also about sexual passion, because Nazneen eventually finds a lover of the other kind, Karim, the rag-trade fixer for whom she slaves at the sewing machine in her sitting room.

Her world begins small in her Tower Hamlets flat, simply observing the neighbours through her window and remembering the sister she left behind, but slowly it grows.

Her daughters are Londoners appalled at their father's dreams of taking them home to Dhaka. Karim opens a door to community and Muslim politics. She has to deal with the poisonous loan shark, Mrs Islam and her sons - great comic creations. And her sister's life in Dhaka unfolds through letters just as brilliantly observed.

And all this rich observation of life is unfolded by a writer with a gorgeous and fertile gift for simile. I laughed out loud at the broken television aerial hanging out of the window like a suicide, the white radical activists whose clothes had so many tags and flaps that "it was as if they had dressed themselves as tents and to settle for the night they would simply insert a few poles and lie down".