Foxy-T

"This is, in fact, the best book that has ever been written about Brick Lane. No doubt it would have won lots of prizes if the author had had a slightly different name. Anyway, it is about a community really, but it is based around two girls who work in a telephone and computer place off Cannon Street Road, the E-Z Call phone shop. There are all these dubious characters coming in who are out of young offenders institutes or whatever, people from the Bangladeshi community, and it’s really about the progress of these two girls, and the whole book is written in Bangladeshi idiom. It takes a while to get into, but then you do get into it and it’s an amazing tour de force. As you can imagine, no. Tony White! It was very well reviewed when it came out. I don’t know how he knows so much about the community and I’m not an expert on the dialect, but to the extent to which I do know about these things, I’d say it was pretty authentic. I think you can often learn more from a novel than you can from a factual book."