Salaam Brick Lane

Hall, Tarquin

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0719565561 ISBN 13 : 9780719565564

Editeur : John Murray, 2006

Salaam Brick Lane A gritty, hilarious and often touching memoir of a year spent living in the immigrant melting pot of London's East End. Full description

Revue de presse :

Well-written without mawkish pieties. (Saga Magazine)

'Charming, brilliant, affectionate and quietly impassioned ... it manages to be balanced, humane and life-affirming. I hope it sells out faster than cases of Chalky's "Coat de Roen"'. (Guardian)

Tarquin Hall is right at the heart of what he writes about . . . Hall's new friends spring brilliantly to life off the page . . . it's hard to imagine a more moving or more telling record of lives on the edge (Caroline Gascoigne, Sunday Times)

Amused and amusing, this is a refreshing addition to the accounts being offered of the area. (Stratford Recorder)

Forthright and funny (Daily Telegraph)

Fascinating and funny (Canterbury, Herne Bay, Whitstable & Faversham Focu)

Powerful (Kent Messenger)

I was absolutely riveted. It's funny, enlightening and very moving . . . I'm recommending it to all my friends just because it's such a good read. (Kate Fox, author of Watching the English)

He has a fine ear for the myriad speech patterns of the East End's varied inhabitants. (Daily Mail)

A remarkable cross-section of British society . . . Hall's sympathetic, anecdotal approach is a fine counter to the appalling racism of much current tabloid journalism . . . This is a fine and eloquent book. (What's On UK)

Présentation de l'éditeur :

After ten years living abroad, Tarquin Hall wanted to return to his native London. Lured by his nostalgia for a leafy suburban childhood spent in south-west London, he returned with his Indian-born, American fiance in tow. But, priced out of the housing market, they found themselves living not in a townhouse, oozing Victorian charm, but in a squalid attic above a Bangladeshi sweatshop on London's Brick Lane. A grimy skylight provided the only window on their new world: a filthy, noisy street where drug dealers and prostitutes peddled their wares and tramps urinated on the pavements. At night, traffic lights lit up the ceiling and police sirens wailed into the early hours.

Yet, as Hall got to know Brick Lane, he discovered beneath its unlovely surface an inner world where immigrants and asylum seekers struggle to better themselves and dream of escape. Salaam Brick Lane is a journey of discovery by an outsider in his own native city. It offers an explicit glimpse of the underbelly of London's most infamous quarter, the real-life world of Monica Ali's bestselling novel.