Love Marriage, Monica Ali
Love Marriage, Monica Ali
2 Rating(s)
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

Love Marriage

Author: Monica Ali

Narrator: Ayesha Dharker

Unabridged: 15 hr 51 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/03/2022


Synopsis

Named a Best Book of 2022 So Far 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).

About Monica Ali

Monica Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and grew up in England. She was named one of the 20 best young British novelists under 40 by Granta. She is the author of four previous novels, including Untold Story and Brick Lane, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Guardian Book Prize, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was named a winner of the 2003 Discover Award for Fiction and a New York Times Editors’ Choice Book that same year. She lives in London with her husband and two children.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Baba on May 28, 2023

Middle class British-Indian-Muslim junior-doctor Yasmin Ghorami (with conservative parents and a college drop-out brother) is engaged to doctor Joe Sangster, sole child of an outwardly loving, but intrusive, feminist icon and intellectual 'Harry' Harriet. As the two families get closer together long......more

Goodreads review by Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer on March 17, 2023

Monica Ali’s novelistic career of course got off to a spectacular start in 2003 with the Booker shortlisted bestseller “Brick Lane” (where as Bookie’s favourite it was somehow beaten by perhaps the worst Booker winner of all time in “Vernon God Little). And famously she made the influential once-a-d......more

Goodreads review by Barbara on May 16, 2022

3.5 stars: Kirkus referred to “Love Marriage” as “a comedy of manners of Britain’s urban middle class” which it is and more. Author Monica Ali takes betrothed young doctors from different cultural backgrounds and has fun bringing their families together. Yasmin Ghorami is a doctor specializing in ger......more

Goodreads review by Paul on May 21, 2022

The first printing of this book looked like this but mine is just an ordinary copy, just as well as I might have been otherwise tempted to eat it since it looks delicious like a literary Battenburg cake But you ought not to judge a book by its sugary outward coating and pleasing bulk. I was a big fan......more


Quotes

"Ayesha Dharker, a Bombay-born British actor, performs this darkly comic audiobook smartly and sensitively. She gives every character their due. Her intonations, whether for Brits or Indian immigrants, are subtle and unique. Her portrayal of the conflicted heroine, Dr. Yasmin Ghorami, is apt, capturing all her angst. Perhaps her most eloquent renditions are of Yasmin’s Bengali immigrant parents, whose story provides the novel’s title. The plot traces the family’s intersections with Yasmin’s coming marriage to another young doctor, Joe Sangster, whose shrouded backstory initiates the action. His mother, Helen, an activist and provocateur, represents the English progressive intelligentsia and is, by turns, funny and sad. Secrets are revealed, and lives are altered in this finely tuned fiction."