Love Marriage is a delicious book that you will want to retreat into, so complete is the world that Ali has created. Akin to Brick Lane, Ali's new book centres around the relationships and interactions between the culture of Bengal and that of contemporary London. What begins as an examination of the love story of Yasmin and Joe as they plan their wedding gradually pulls in multifaceted threads as ideologies, cultures and long held beliefs are tested. The layering of plotlines as the novel progresses enriches the reading experience and heightens the realistic tone of the piece,

Wow this book did not disappoint at all, it was such a joy to read, written so well you got know each of the characters in depth. Love marriage was more than just a story of who you choose to marry, a must read in my opinion
Thank you for the chance to read this amazing book.

Really glad to have a new Monica Ali to read! Loved the light hearted tone of this whilst covering some harder hitting topics like mixed marriages, our relationships to our parents and what it's like to be the children of immigrants. I liked that some of the chapters are written from the perspective of different characters so there the reader has a really well rounded view of everyone's experience, without taking away from Yasmin's story as the key character.

I really really enjoyed reading this book. It raised so many relevant, thought provoking issues, in an engaging way without losing the pace of the story. Her characters were all different with different issues but also managed to be empathetic. Lots of humerous moments throughout Quite a few twists and turns I didnt see coming A must read

Another winner from Monica Ali.
Yasmin and Joe are from two different cultures who find commin ground in their work and are preparing for marriage. As the story progresses the lives of their parents become entangled. Joe's upbtinging has been chaotic, bohemian and unusual; Yasmin on the other hand has a typical English Bengali famly. The novel starts with the couple obviously very much in love and preparing for their wedding. As the story progresses we follow Yasmin's attempts to recognise whether love is enough, while dealing her parents' complicated and difficult lives, her wayward brother, Joe's anxieties and her future mother in law's eccentricities. This is an absorbing and clever book, filled with humours and wit. It is peopled with a variety of characters, particularly the mothers whose pasts harbour secrets.
Monica Ali has triumphed again with this complex examination of what love and marriage mean in 21st century England.

Love Marriage is about Yasmin a South Asian woman who is engaged to be married to Joe, a white British man. I was expecting the story to be about the cultural differences between the two, but what I actually read was a couple who had no cultural differences! I found most of the characters unlikable, for example Yasmin who is a doctor who is really quite silly, and selfish and Joe is quite dull at times. I think what really felt unrealistic to me was how Anisha, Yasmin's mother, who is a devout Muslim is perfectly ok with her daughter marrying someone who isn't a Muslim, sex outside of marriage, alcohol consumption and illegitimate children amongst other issues. I think what really annoyed me the most is this is just another story of Muslims who do anything but practice their faith, I actually see no point in having a story where the characters are Muslims, they could actually have been any background. The book also felt overly long at times, with a lot of medical detail that wasn't really needed. The only redeeming features were I liked Anisha's arc and I liked Pepperdine, and I thought the ending was hopeful, but on the whole a disappointing and quite infuriating read, which is a shame as Monica Ali has a enjoyable writing style. I give this a 2.5 out of 5.

Monica Ali delivers such intricate observations of family, of love and above all, of the complexities of being human.

Yasmin is engaged to Joe. Her biggest worry is her parents meeting his mother, Harriet, who is a huge influence in his life, and a successful feminist writer. She's somewhat embarassed by her parents. But all goes well.

But life rapidly begins to unravel. Joe confesses infidelity. She then begins an affair. She's having massive doubts about her chosen career and her unemployed brother has got his girlfriend pregnant. When their father finds out their whole family becomes fractured.

As Yasmin tries to come to terms with her own infidelity, she is plagued with worry about her parents and brother. When her niece is born and becomes sick, the family rift seems to be healed.

She confesses to Joe, and they split up.

And for the first time, she learns the truth about her parents love marriage.

There is also social commentary in this story. Questions about identity and culture. But also, a powerful glimpse into the increasing bureaucracy that is destroying all that our belived NHS should stand for.

I really enjoy all of Monica Ali's work, and this is no exception. Absorbing and life affirming, this is everything I look for in a book.

Brick Lane by Monica Ali was one of the first novels I read when I moved to the UK in 2008. So I was excited when I saw Love Marriage available on NetGalley.  This book kept me up a few nights, including last night until half past midnight. I wanted to know what would happen to the characters!

What I loved:
- The vast array of characters from a range of backgrounds and ages. Some of my favourites were Rania, the main character's hijab-wearing friend, and Anisah, the mum, whose character arc was fascinating
- The reflexions about religion - I learned quite a few things about Islam
- The main character's internal dialogue and struggles with societal expectations of her, an Asian muslim woman, junior doctor in the UK. I loved the incident with the racist woman in particular 
- The therapy sessions about family relationships
- The little plot twists, even thought it was mainly a character-driven book
- The ending 😊

I was going to start a section about what bothered me, but I can't quite put my finger on it. I think that perhaps there were a few too many loose threads? A couple of the characters also seemed caricatural (Arif the brother; some of the doctors) There were also passages about diseases and doctors which lost me a bit, but this is my highly subjective opinion. I'm not sure how to define the book's genre; it's definitely not romance.

Overall I really liked this book and it's made me want to read Ali's other books, and perhaps re-read Brick Lane too. Thank you @NetGalley and @littlebrownbookgroup_uk for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Call me an uncultured heathen but this just did not do it for me. Maybe I am too much of a country bumpkin but I could not get interested in the characters, I was not terribly interested in the metropolitan life and I ended up thinking about cleaning out my cupboards. Do not worry - I found another book and my cupboards are still filthy!

Yasmin Ghorami has always believed her parents to have had a perfect 'love marriage', a chance encounter leading to romance and happily-ever-after despite the difficulties they faced, establishing themselves in Britain and striving to provide the best for their children. Now she believes she's found the same herself - a fellow doctor, handsome, kind, caring, someone she's sure will make a good husband and father. Her only worry is how her traditional Muslim parents will get on with Joe's feminist, liberal, outspoken mother.

As the publisher's blurb says, "Love Marriage is a story about who we are and how we love in today's Britain - with all the complications and contradictions of life, desire, marriage and family. What starts as a captivating social comedy develops into a heart-breaking and gripping story of two cultures, two families and two people trying to understand one another."

Yasmin and Joe are in love, their wedding set for a few months' time, and all appears to be going well till their mothers get involved and take over the planning. Under the surface though, both of them have issues that need to be sorted before they finally commit, and as their mothers start to get to know each other a whole raft of family secrets come tumbling out. The foundations on which both Yasmin and Joe have built their lives suddenly seem very rocky.

It's funny (though I felt a little uncomfortable being a white Englishwoman laughing at Indian stereotypes), warm, compassionate, forgiving. Although it deals with issues surrounding class and culture, it is first and foremost a story about people, about how we define ourselves, and about the stories we tell to make sense of who we are.

I'd heard of Monica Ali but hadn't read her work before. Now I feel I should dash out and immerse myself in her back catalogue.

I was really looking forward to this: I loved Brick Lane and I really enjoy stories about first- and second-generation emigrants and culture clashes. However, I was disappointed in this one. None of the characters were sympathetic and the author didn't even seem to like them; in fact, worse, it felt like she was mocking all of them. I don't mind unsympathetic characters in a novel or a "cold" author but this gave me nothing to hold onto. The hospital parts seemed there to talk about junior doctors, which is fine, but so much detail about individual patients did bloat it a bit. I found myself more concerned about the mechanics of the period sex scene (surely it'd have gone through to the mattress) and then at half-way realised I wasn't bothered what happened or about any of the characters and unfortunately had to give up. I felt like it was all telling, not showing - and I had really wanted to like this book!

Monica Ali returns with a bang. Yasmin,a young doctor, is set to marry Joe in a “ love marriage”. Yasmin is from a Bengali family and Joe from a very different bohemian background. She is conservative in her ways whereas Joe hides sexual issues. The two families come together at Joe’s mothers home and so Yasmin’s world erupts and lives are blown apart and reevaluated.

In this book Monica Ali does what she does well: tell a character-driven story that focusses on family dynamics and very often character flaws. Nonetheless, she writes in a way that you will emphasize with the characters – at least to some extent. I actually struggled a little bit to really like them in this instance.
This book is essentially a family drama and I’m not going to lie: While I enjoyed it, it won’t appeal to everyone. There’s – in fact – quite a bit of drama, most of the characters have some sort of secret or at least something they are trying to hide/present in a different light. It’s also a slightly longer book and often detailed – this is in line with Ali’s usual writing but won’t be for everyone. The book is diverse as it follows a white British family and a family of South Asian immigrants to the UK (in which we see different embodiments of being British and Muslim). As such the story is spiced with political and social commentary on race, class, religion and identity in modern Britain. It’s a good book by gifted writer and some ways I feel the topic and the setting are more widely appealing than “Brick Lane”, even if the latter was probably the better/more important book.

One of my favourite reads of 2022 so far. Insightful, powerful, educational and real. This is the first book from this author I have read but will definitely not be the last.

I thoroughly enjoyed entering into Yasmin's world and seeing how the apparently well-stacked bricks start to wobble and collapse around her, allowing her to finally discover the truth of her own feelings and the foundations on which they were built. Well written and absorbing to the very end.

Love Marriage by Monica Ali
Having read and loved Brick Lane I was eagerly anticipating this book and it didn’t disappoint. It is all about Yasmin, the daughter of Indian immigrants training to be a doctor, and Joe, the son of a famous feminist, Harriet Sangster. The story opens with the parents just about to meet each other. Yasmin’s mother is busy cooking huge amounts of food to transport to Joe’s mothers house and her brother is taking great delight in wondering what his parents will make of the explicit nude photos of Harriet he has found.
Joe has some unresolved issues due to the dysfunctional relationship he had with his mother as he was growing up. Yasmin finds herself questioning her feelings about the relationship, sex and the marriage when Joe is unfaithful to her. Additionally her own family is falling apart around her as they battle to accept her brother’s life choices.
I was expecting a complicated novel about an interracial couple and pressures from their families, but it a much larger agenda than this. It is not just about Yasmin and Joe; it deals with religion, loyalty, addiction, sexual assault, motivation, anticipation and also simple friendship.

The characters are extremely well drawn. Each character has their flaws, some many flaws, and yet you still least empathise with them. The writing is excellent and it is therefore easy to read; you become invested in the characters.
It feels as though this book is about real people and real issues. I highly recommend it and thoroughly enjoyed it. Many thanks to the author, the publishers and Net Galley for the opportunity to read it in return for an honest review.

I received this book as e-ARC from the publisher Virago, Little Brown Book Group via The NetGalley. I requested it as the author was new to me and I wanted to expand my literary horizons.

There are multiple storylines in this book: we meet Yasmin and her family, then we read about Joe, his mother Harriet, and therapist Sandor.

Yasmin is a 26 year old junior doctor engaged to a fellow doctor, Joe. She lives with her parents and younger brother, Arif. Her mother came from a wealthy family in Calcutta, whereas her father was a poor village boy. All her life Yasmin was led to believe her parents’ marriage was a ‘love marriage’ and she wishes to experience the same thing.

The book starts when Yasmin’s parents meet Joe’s mother, an outspoken feminist Harriet, who suggests that the couple should have a Muslim wedding. Yasmin feels pressurised to accept. However, when a co-worker confesses to Yasmin that Joe had slept with a nurse, things become very edgy for Yasmin. Of course, she blames herself, but later on decides that she needs to evoke a revenge of her own. That’s how Yasmin begins an affair with another doctor.

As I was reading this book, it struck me that everyone had secrets in this story: Yasmin was trying to hide her infidelity, Joe confessed something to his therapist, which the reader finds out pretty soon as the story unfolds. Much later, we get to Yasmin’s parents secret.

It is a story of two families, a traditional Muslim family, contrasted with a single-parent liberal upbringing. What struck me was that the products of these families, the children, were equally troubled. Yasmin seemed at crossroads in her life: didn’t know whether she wished to continue practising medicine and whether she wanted to be married to Joe. Her brother Arif was living in the shadow of his ‘great’ doctor sister and was constantly arguing with their father. Joe was controlled by his mother all his life and thanks to the therapist, he began to piece his life back together.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Many thanks to Virago and Little Brown Book Group for accepting my NetGalley request.

Found this book way too slow and dry and pedantic in a way that just needed words on the page but this wasn't doing anything for the story except slow it down, sometimes to an actual stop where you wonder how the engine will rev up again... The characters were not interesting at all, sometimes like caricatures rather than fully drawn people. Expected a lot from this, but it reads like a rough first draft that went and ventured everywhere and no editor was brought in to help curb this lack of direction and extra unnecessary prose

Love holds half the weight of the term ‘love marriage’ but is love truly enough to balance the other half of a locution that has been ingrained in South Asian mindsets as an utterance either meant to be annihilated or desperately aspired. The Ghoramis, a British-Indian family, have already met the highest level of ‘modernity’ that a desi immigrant in a suburban London home inevitably hopes to chase—Yasmin’s father, an anglicised and proud doctor, and mother, a kind-hearted home-maker, had bravely left the expected arranged marriage route in their time to unite through a love marriage. Understandably, they’re legends to their second generation children.

Yasmin is a trained doctor spending most of her time in the geriatric wards of a hospital. She is engaged to a fellow doctor, Joe, who is simply perfect: intelligent, kind, charming—the son of a rich feminist author and activist, Harriet Sangster, who is best known for posing nude in the 70s. Clearly, the two families are different. The Ghoramis are poised with Shaokat, the demanding father, being proud of his emergence from poverty and for integrating so well into a new culture, and Anisah, being the quiet Muslim woman and an excellent cook who holds her beliefs close. The Sangsters are delicately clinging on to the newfangled habits they’ve long kept, whether it’s Joe’s mother wandering into his bathroom while he’s showering or Harriet herself being an outlandish comic figure too flamboyant for even her own son.

But why should the families represent the two love birds who are finding themselves again as the self-images they adorned are slowly unravelling? This fifth novel by the author of the bestselling debut, Brick Lane , shortlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, makes you wonder if the decision to marry can simply be sealed by a meet-the-parents event drenched in hilarity—especially when the laughs come at the expense of an immigrant mother’s wonky grammar—where a subtly domineering mother of Joe corners his fiance into planning a Muslim wedding against the bride’s own will to simply climb a ladder of western liberalism.

So it is a love marriage.

Yasmin and Joe’s relationship doesn’t depend on their families or their clashing cultures. But the growing weight of secrets and a haunted past in the Ghorami family, and the straining unnaturality of the mother-son duo in the Sangster family will upset the essence of the two ‘lovers’. As Yasmin finds herself lost in a chaotic dementia ward and navigates misleading legacies in a home occupied by her increasingly hard-drinking father and a discontented, uncertain brother attempting to define his faith; and as Joe finds himself sitting across a psychiatrist recounting the dysfunctional relationship he shares with his mother and infidelity, it’s impossible to not worry: would this really be a love marriage?

With a storytelling that details the ordinary lives of decent people and a prose that exposes the dark difficulties faced by these ordinary people trying to live decently, Love Marriage doesn’t flaunt the extravagance it holds as an engaging fiction and instead rightfully lets it simply be—for you to mark it with everything it really is, from the stacks of Tupperware to the metropolitan liberal shenanigans. Whether it’s Joe fighting his addiction, Yasmin resenting the intergenerational pain that inevitably gets passed down, Anisah letting her friendship with Harriet blossom, or a patient that asks for a British doctor when attended by Yasmin, everything will comment on gender, race, class, and religion through explorations of passion, family, morality, and heart.

Ordinary yet extravagant; definitely dramatic.

Overall, Love Marriage impresses with how remarkably it sets up a perfect backdrop of the everyday—true to the diaspora— for powerful, ordinary questions around societal expectations, self-discovery, interracial relationships, multiculturalism, and the push and pull between religious and rebellious identities; ultimately lacing this multifaceted tale with humour, sympathy, and plain understanding.

Yasmin seems to have it all - a successful career as a doctor, a handsome doctor fiancee and loving close-knit family - but something is not quite right. Her future mother-in-law is a feminist firebrand, confident in her sexuality and everything Yasmin's mother is not yet when they meet they form a fast friendship. Her fiancee Joe has secrets which he only divulges to his therapist and Yasmin worries about whether she is capable in bed. As Yasmin discovers sex, her mother discovers independence and her world collapses.
Monica Ali is a favourite writer of mine as she manages to straddle a number of genres very successfully. Put this book in a pink cover and it could pass for superior chick-lit but there is too strong a streak of rebellion in the characters to totally convince in that genre. It's a populist and entertaining read and therefore not high literature yet it includes psychology and racial issues as well. Needless to say I loved it!