"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...

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.

Nazneen is a young Bangladeshi woman who arrives in London during the 1980s. She leaves behind her beloved sister and home, for an arranged marriage and a new life. In a loveless marriage to the middle aged Chanu, she feels trapped within the four walls of her flat in East London. She begins to fear that her soul is quietly dying. Meanwhile, her sister Hasina, continues to live a carefree life back in Bangladesh. Nazneen struggles to accept her lifestyle...