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Summary
Summary
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker !
"Cultural clashes, political satire, Oedipal conflicts, elegant prose--they're all here in this romp of a book." --Oprah Daily
A Phenomenal Book Club Pick and a New York Times Book Review Group Text Selection, Love Marriage is a glorious moving novel from Booker Prize shortlisted Monica Ali, who has "an inborn generosity that cannot be learned" ( The New York Times Book Review) .
In present-day London, 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 formidable mother, Harriet, is a famous feminist. The gulf between families is vast. So, too, is the gulf in sexual experience between Yasmin and Joe.
As the wedding day draws near, misunderstandings, infidelities, and long-held secrets upend both Yasmin's relationship and that of her parents, a "love marriage," according to the family lore that Yasmin has believed all her life.
A gloriously acute observer of class, sexual mores, and the mysteries of the human heart, Monica Ali has written a "riveting" ( BookPage , starred review) social comedy and a moving, revelatory story of two cultures, two families, and two people trying to understand one another that's "sure to please Ali's fans and win some new ones" ( Publishers Weekly ).
Author Notes
Monica Ali was born October 20, 1967. She is a British writer of Bangladeshi origin. She is the author of Brick Lane, her debut novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2003.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Booker-nominated Ali (Brick Lane) returns with the complex yet breezy account of a 26-year-old London medical student who questions whether she really wants to be a doctor or if she's merely carrying out her father's wishes. Yasmin Ghorami's family is Indian and Muslim, and she is engaged to white upper-class colleague Joe Sangster, whose mother, Harriet, is a famous feminist activist. As wedding planning commences with Harriet and Yasmin's mother, Anisah, at the helm, tensions rise between the couple, but it turns out religious and cultural differences are the least of the roadblocks. The delicate web of familial relationships and drama is held up by a vibrant supporting cast: Yasmin's underachieving brother and his girlfriend's unplanned pregnancy; Anisah's midlife awakening to her own power, and Yasmin's father's increasing alcohol use and isolation as he clings to his conservative religious beliefs. Everything leads toward the reveal of a dark secret held by the Ghoramis that threatens to undermine the engagement. The characters' brisk discussions on politics, culture, and race skate over ideological divides, the substance of which emerges in dramatic irony and creates a textured portrayal of an immigrant family. This is sure to please Ali's fans and win some new ones. (May)
Guardian Review
A throwaway moment in Monica Ali's new novel introduces us to a minor character, an unpublished young black author who, when he talks of struggling to sell his manuscript - a futuristic thriller about an eco-terrorist attack on a billionaire's post-apocalyptic bolthole in New Zealand - finds himself told to try something "closer to home"; drop the sci-fi, in other words, and write about being black in Britain today. You sense Ali speaks of what she knows; born in Dhaka and raised in England, she has arguably spent her whole career to date wriggling in the jaws of publishing's authenticity fetish. Brick Lane, her bestselling 2003 debut about a Bangladeshi teenager's arranged marriage in east London, earned her a reputation as a vital voice of multicultural Britain - which meant no one quite knew what to make of her next book, Alentejo Blue, tales of village life in rural Portugal. She fared better with In the Kitchen, about migrant labour in London; less so - putting it mildly - with the counterfactual shenanigans of Untold Story, in which Princess Diana, fearing assassination, fakes her own death and relocates to the US after cosmetic surgery in Brazil. The pattern - one novel a market-pleaser, the next a curious left turn - continues with Ali's latest book, which is set in London in the wake of the Brexit vote and centres on Yasmin, a trainee doctor who is the daughter of Bengali immigrants. She's about to marry her colleague, Joe, who lives with his subtly domineering mother, Harriet, a feminist academic still famous for posing nude in her 70s heyday. The setup starts off as giggly meet-the-parents comedy, with early laughs coming at the expense of the malapropisms and wonky grammar of Yasmin's head-wobbling mother, Anisah, who mistakes a Howard Hodgkin painting on Harriet's wall for a long-cherished childhood artwork by Joe. For his part, Joe faces embarrassment of his own when his mother's self-congratulatory liberalism all but corners his fiancee into planning a Muslim wedding against her will. As Ali pokes fun at the unwitting ironies of one-size-fits-all feminism, the easy gags soon give way to the drama of a busy plot rife with secrets and lies. Yasmin gets a shock when a nurse on her ward lifts the lid on Joe's double life, foreshadowed in segments told from his therapist's point of view. An even more seismic upset follows the revelation that her parents' cross-class marriage was a murkier affair than let on by the family lore of an unarranged love match. We stick chiefly to Yasmin's perspective, her self-image slowly unravelling once she begins to grasp the nature of the shadow cast by her increasingly hard-drinking father, also a doctor. Private turmoil is amplified by ever-present workplace aggro, as Ali portrays a hard-pressed NHS prey to dodgy contractors and hidebound hierarchies, with a whistleblower subplot involving overmedicated geriatrics. There's also lashings of sex, thanks to Yasmin's suave older superior, an outlet for tit-for-tat infidelity; more lurid turns involve Joe's relationship with his mother, whose readiness to walk in on him in the shower (among other liberties) further brings into relief Yasmin's body-conscious inhibitions, before paving the way for a gnarly Oedipal storyline. If the novel's mickey-taking of Harriet as a superannuated pin-up of second-wave feminism feels especially pointed, it may be relevant that Germaine Greer once wrote sharply on the row over Brick Lane, suggesting non-Asian readers trusted its portrayal of British Bangladeshis simply because Ali had a Bangladeshi father, a fact that counted for less "in the eyes of British Bangladeshis"... some of whom "did not recognise themselves". Either way, Harriet's story, like everyone's here, is ultimately about sympathy, not score-settling. Even Ali's broadest strokes - as when Anisah falls for a lesbian performance artist - butter us up for a sucker-punch climax in which a variety of buried sorrows come to light. We all, the novel seems to say, have our cross to bear, even overweening mums and dads, and (as Yasmin ends up thinking) "life is not simple": a last-page banality brought to life by dint of the accumulated backstory generously granted to each member of the book's two families. A topically freighted tale of premarital tension told with easy-reading propulsion, Love Marriage has the air of a surefire hit, and at the very least deserves to underwrite whatever curveball Ali has up her sleeve for next time: roll on the eco-thriller.
Kirkus Review
Two London families--one Bengali, one White--collide spectacularly when their two eldest children decide to marry. Yasmin Ghorami is a people-pleaser. At 26, doing what others expect is so ingrained in her that when her younger brother, Arif, asks her what she hoped to do before she became a doctor like their father, she can't even remember if she ever had separate dreams of her own. She follows the rules of her family and her faith. She still lives with her parents and Arif in London, but not for long: She's about to be married to Joe Sangster, a fellow doctor. Her parents, both Muslims with differing degrees of religiosity, thwarted tradition and married for love, and Yasmin is convinced that marrying Joe is her own romantic destiny. As the wedding plans coalesce, Yasmin has to deal with her future mother-in-law, Harriet, a Gloria Steinem--esque figure who is one of the leading feminist writers and thinkers in England. Harriet's urbane, liberal fetishizing of Yasmin's family--especially her homemaker mother--is a destabilizing influence, as is Harriet's possessive relationship with Joe. Then there's Arif's aimlessness and his increasing awareness of the racism, both blatant and microaggressive, in his and Yasmin's daily lives. Yasmin looks to Joe for stability, but he's got secrets of his own. Before long, Yasmin is forced to reexamine the foundations of her whole life before the cracks threaten to bring everything she knows crumbling down. Ali's immersive novel, skipping deftly between several points of view, might be termed a comedy of manners of Britain's urban middle class, but the comedy here has teeth: Though the book treats its characters with affection, the racial dynamics are conveyed with real, heart-rending bite. A keen look at London life, relationships (especially interracial ones)--and a return to Ali's most celebrated territory. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The opening sentence from Anna Karenina might equally apply to the particular brand of dysfunction that Ali (Untold Story, 2011) explores in this colorful tale of strained relationships. The story opens in media res with doctor-in-training Yasmin Ghorami getting ready for her wedding to Joe Sangster, a fellow professional at a London hospital. But first the parents must meet. Yasmin worries that Joe's mother, a sexually liberated firecracker of a feminist, is sure to upset the conservative Ghoramis. The cascading sequence of incidents from this first parental meet-and-greet steamrolls over both families and exposes decades-old secrets. Ali's strength lies in exploring the many ways in which class complications manifest--Yasmin's immigrant doctor father, Shoukat, worries about his own humble upbringing while frowning upon his son's relationship with Lucy, a receptionist. The finale is rich, bawdy, and bold, a dramatization of the many ways we fail those closest to us and build lives on shifting sediments of buried feelings. And yet we live for love.
Library Journal Review
This latest from Bangladeshi-born, UK-raised Ali, a Granta Best of Young British Novelists, features 26-year-old medical student Yasmin Ghorami, who's engaged to posh Joe Sangster. To Yasmin's relief, Joe's elegant mother quickly embraces her own not-as-polished mom, but family complications--and Joe's less-than-devoted ways--quickly threaten the romance. With a 125,000-copy first printing.