Monica Ali
In her Year of Reading the World project, Ann Morgan had to lay some groundwork as to what constituted a book "from" a country. Does the author have to be born there? Live there? Does it have to be written about that place? Does it count if it's written about a different place? The answers, it turns out, were rarely straightforward.
A case in point is my archive entry for Bangladesh. Author Monica Ali was born in Bangladesh to a Bangladeshi father and an English mother but then grew up in England from the age of three. Brick Lane begins in Bangladesh and deals with a young woman who moves from a village to enter an arranged marriage in London with and older man. Should this book of culture clash and the immigrant experience then be considered "English" or "Bangladeshi"? Letters to England from the woman's sister in Bangladesh play an important role in the narrative as well, further blurring the line of where the book might be "from".
There isn't, of course, a clear-cut answer to this question, just my own personal choices as I swashbuckle the literary high seas and shifting sands of place as I plot my course to circumnavigate the globe.
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