This is the first book by Monica Ali that I have read. I am very ambivalent, not sure whether I enjoyed this or not. It took me a long time to get into this book and a couple of times I was going to give up. The characters are not particularly nice and with the exception on Anisah, I found it hard to care about any of them. It is a slow moving book, well written but just not for me.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy

Love Marriage is a comedy in the sense that all the pieces are thrown up into the air at the beginning then resolved at the end. Monica Ali looks at unresolved trauma, culture clashes and ultimately how difficult it is ever to really know another person. Or to know ourselves. More than this it's a novel with wonderful characters and a great story. I loved it.

A story following Yasmine who is coming from Indian Muslim background living in North London, her fiance Joe who is coming from a white privileged background living in West London and their families. The story represents cultural differences in terms of relationship, marriage, family, values, gender and cultural differences in general.

In all honesty, I did not find this read to be as enjoyable as I was hoping for due to the difficult writing style.

With thanks to NetGalley and especially to Little, Brown Book Group UK for an electronic ARC in return for an honest review.

I was looking forward to reading Monika Ali’s new book and I was not disappointed. As in her previous bestseller, Brick Lane, the story centres around the life of a family living in London, who immigrated to the UK and whose children were born in this country. The Ghorami household is a traditional, quite conservative Muslim family. Monika Ali is a master in carving out character by giving them their own voice by turn of phrase, choice of words and the particular way they articulate – I always find this is something that makes for a particularly pleasurable reading experience.

Yasmin,26, works in a dementia-friendly hospital ward and shares the plight of all junior doctors working for the NHS. She is just about to marry Joe, who lives with his overbearing mother Harriet - a highly respected yet self-absorbed academic and staunch feminist - and he starts to see a psychotherapist to help him with his addiction to sex – about which Yasmin had been left in the dark. Yasmin’s brother Arif struggles to find his place in life and rebels against the rules and expectations placed on him by his father. When he leaves the family home in order to live with his pregnant girlfriend Lucy, he sets off a trail of actions that shake the family to the core. The dad, Shaokat, a doctor and family man is enlightened in many ways, but he is a patriarch who sets rules that push his family to braking point. And then there is Anisha, the mum and home-maker, who is very loveable, chaotic and full of stories. She is brave, open-minded and so much more than her traditional role as housewife would ever suggest. By the end of the book, none of these characters remained unchanged – the unfolding events sent all of them on a journey of self-discovery and a deeper understanding of the people they love and care about.

Yasmin sums it up: ‘Life is not simple’, that’s so very true - no matter how polished the façade behind we often hide the things that are not so easy to explain or to accept. Monika Ali wrote her story around this simple truth and she does it with an abundance of warmth and humour. I loved it.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Virago Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

I enjoyed the narrative of this book - it deals with an impressive range of subjects sensitively and well. However, I couldn't get completely on board with the writing style and I thought Joe was a bit one-dimensional - I would have loved to have a few chapters from his perspective, as we did Harriet, rather than through the framing of the psychotherapist. The reveal at the end was nicely done and as a story of the tensions between first and second generation immigrants, it shines.

This is a fantastically well-written book, with exquisitely three-dimensional characters who leap off the page and into your life. It’s explores relationships in Britain today and does so in a way that is intelligent and honest, yet non-judgemental. Beautiful, heartbreaking, inspiring and insightful.

Monica Ali has a way of presenting her characters that makes then feel like old friends. Her cast in Love Marriage are diverse, flawed but incredibly believable, likeable and entertaining. It is hard to pick out a favourite, but mine were probably Yasmin, a junior doctor who has to live up to many expectations, her fiancee Joe, who is struggling with his own demons, and Yasmin's Mum who jumps off the page - I loved her. Mind you, there was also Nick's therapist who was brilliantly portrayed. the way that the author included their sessions to provide an additional insight was really clever. And then there was Yasmin's brother girlfriend...
This is an insight into the lives of two very different families in modern-day London. It would make a really good book club read and I would buy it for my 80 year old Mum and for my 18 year old daughter. It will make you laugh and make you cry. Very happy to give this 5 stars and I highly recommend it.

Monica Ali writes of relationships, love and family drama, full of humour and heart, reflecting the complex nature of the modern world. Set in London, 26 year old Yasmin Ghorami lives at home, following in her father's footsteps, a trainee doctor working in the hospital geriatric and dementia wards. She lives at home, just like fellow doctor, Joe Sangster, who she is going to marry, a 'love marriage', just like the one she naively believes her parents, first generation Bengali immigrants done good have. The families are set to meet for a dinner in Primrose Hill at Joe's mother, Harriet's home, an anxiety inducing event for Yasmin, embarrassed by her mother, Anisah, her choice of dress, and the fact that she insists on taking plastic bags full of home made indian dishes to the dinner. Yasmin and Joe's plans for a small, inexpensive wedding are shot to pieces with Harriet manipulating and comandeering the arrangements, making it a more Islamic religious affair.

That evening is to prove to be the trigger for Yasmin to re-evaluate her judgements and assumptions about all those close to her, no one more so than her mother whom Harriet (a well known feminist, writer and activist) connects with and takes to big time. When her family experiences major conflict with regard to her father and his difficult relationship with her unemployed brother, Arif, it results in her mother leaving home and finding sanctuary with a Harriet who welcomes her with open arms into her home. Harriet is instrumental in providing the religiously devout Anisah with the space to seek surprisingly unexpected and unconstrained freedoms that shock Yasmin to her core, particularly the relationship with Flame. Joe seeks therapy for his addiction with Sandor who guides him to face up to and address his relationship his mother. As Yasmin sees the world as she knows it begin to disintegrate when it comes to Joe and her family, she is forced to re-examine her sense of identity, the reality of love marriages, her concerns over her profession, family and work out what it is she really wants.

Ali writes a engaging novel full of warmth, and great characters, it has to be said that Anisah does rather steal the show, although I also had a soft spot for Yasmin's best friend, Rania, a solicitor and ninja. I found myself completely immersed in the story from beginning to end, its focus on 2 generations of an immigrant family, being a parent, whilst providing a social commentary on gender, race, class, religion, culture, and geriatric care in hospitals. This might not be a read for everyone, but I have to say that I loved it. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

This is a long book for those who enjoy largely character driven books.

Monica Ali uses her large character list to explore interesting and important situations, attitudes and experiences in the modern world. Trigger warnings for addiction, racism and rape. This is not a light read, but it is a rewarding one if you can stick with unlikeable characters as they work through the worst of themselves and start to become someone a bit better.

The book explores what it means to love someone, what it means to he active in your authenticity, what it is to stand up for who you really want to be. From a doctor's responsibility for their patients though to the responsibility children and parents feel towards each other, from the experience of discrimination through to the ignorance of one's prejudice, this book captures and asks the reader to think about so much.

It is very well done. It is is also very long and relatively slow, I wish I had been in the mood for that kind of read. As it was it took me longer to read this than I would normally and I struggled with it because of that - my advice would be to pick this one up when you are in the right mood for a long book you can live in for some time.

I was lucky enough to I be given a proof of this fab book by @netgalley ⁣
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Yasmin is torn between her traditional family and wanting a new life. What will she do when something happens that turns everything on it’s head? ⁣
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I found this book very readable, despite being fairly slow paced. It was definitely a page turner! I loved how detailed the relationships were; each character was really well fleshed out and felt completely real. I definitely really sympathised with Yasmin's indecision with what to do with her life and relationship. Also, the insight into a minority family in the UK was fantastic and so well written. However, the only thing that spoiled it for me slightly was the ending - I didn't completely love it and it felt a little unsatisfactory.

DNF at 37%
I was really looking forward to reading this as I had really enjoyed 'Brick Lane,' but I'm afraid 'Love Marriage' wasn't a match. To me the characters were caricatures and predictable and the story line didn't interest me enough to continue. Sad to have to come to this conclusion.
Thank you Little Brown Netgalley UK for the ARC.

Monica Ali's Love Marriage is both a great read and a thought-provoking exploration of relationships, love and marriage across different cultures. The novel appears to centre around the relationship between Yasmin and Joe, two London-based junior doctors who are engaged to be married. They come from different backgrounds: Yasmin is from a Muslim family and her parents came to Britain from India after they married; Joe is the son of a leading feminist activist, writer and intellectual who has brought him on her own after separating from his father.

At the start of the novel, Ali explores the tensions which Yasmin (in particular) must navigate between their parents' desires and her own as they plan their wedding; however, the novel also begins to interrogate a number of other relationships, including Yasmin's disaffected brother's relationship with his British girlfriend, Joe's very close relationship with his mother, and Yasmin's parents' own "love marriage" between her wealthy mother and her penniless but ambitious father, a story that Yasmin has grown up hearing which defied the cultural expectations of its time.

I was completely absorbed by Yasmin's experiences - she is a sympathetic protagonist and the dilemmas she faced felt completely believable. In particular, Ali is very adept at drawing out the role that embarrassment can play when trying to move between different social milieus; some of these moments of embarrassment have a comedic element, but Ali also identifies the acute sense of pain or shame that can arise from these experiences in a way that rang very true.

I also really liked the complexity of the novel's fairly large cast of characters, who are not homogenised by their backgrounds; for instance, Yasmin and her father, mother, brother and close friend all embody different aspects of what it means to be British and Muslim: for instance, her father considers himself a "secular Muslim" but fiercely resists any suggestion that British Muslims are affected by Islamophobia, while her mother is far more devout but also proves more liberal in many of her attitudes. They also, almost without exception, demonstrate the ability to change and develop in ways which are often surprising but also feel authentic and believable. About three quarters of the way through the novel I worried that some characters were in danger of becoming caricatures but the brilliant final section of the novel totally allayed this concern, and there were a number of twists that I did not see coming.

I found this a very enjoyable and compelling novel overall - thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for sending an ARC to review!

An absolute gem of a book, so readable and thought-provoking that I am still thinking about it now a few days on from finishing. The book opens with Yasmine's family preparing to meet the mother of her fiance, Joe. She worries that her Mother will have any conversation and will be shocked by the forceful, feminist, free-thinking author Harriet. Her father is a doctor -as is she and Joe - and is upstanding and intelligent. The scene is nicely comedic and we sympathise with Yasmine as they set out at least an hour early for the appointment. However, nothing can be assumed in this story or is it as it appears on the surface. What is a love marriage anyway? How many different kinds of love are there? So many strands in this book, so many strong characters, so many tales to tell. Loved it.

I was lucky enough to receive a copy of Love Marriage via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Unfortunately I didn’t much like this book; I couldn’t empathise with the characters at all and found them quite distasteful in their own way. The parents’ story was the most interesting part and I felt their backstory should have been front and centre rather than an afterthought at the end. I didn’t like the main character at all and thought she was nothing more than a spoilt brat. I just didn’t see the appeal of this book at all and found it overly long and generally quite boring, but felt I should finish it so I could give a rounded review. Not for me.

As a fan of her novel ‘Brick Lane’, it was an absolute delight to read her latest book.

Focusing on a family in the midst of various crises but keeping up appearances, we watch as slow changes and the unsaid threaten to engulf them all. But the book always manages to feel light and propulsively readable as it goes along.

Family members seek to unravel the secrets, neuroses and trauma that has been stewing for years, and the end result is a book that feels cathartic and enjoyable, even whilst dealing with heavy topics like addiction, abuse, and racism.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Junior doctors Yasmin and Joe have known each other less than a year and are planning to get married. ‘Love Marriage’ begins with Yasmin and her parents preparing to travel from South London to Primrose Hill to meet Joe’ and his mother and discuss wedding plans. The scene is set for a novel of culture clash, of the immigrant and second generation experience, but in fact we get an exploration of characters, exploring flaws and assumptions. At several points in the narrative Monica swerves opinion about a character, showing them (and all of us) to be complex and the product of their experience. This is a really enjoyable thought provoking read.

An important read from the writer of Brick Lane. I requested because of the name on the cover. I stayed because of the deftly portrayed characters and strong, universal themes. A book that will never outstay its welcome.

Monica Ali has the most remarkable talent for creating nuance and drawing out the heart and depth in any situation. Love Marriage is a wonderfully beautiful exploration of relationships across and between families, it's about the things that happen that cannot always be said out loud but the ramifications are clear to see and it makes you look not just at the beauty of love, but the damage it can do as well. It's quiet and peaceful, but makes a big, intense impact. I enjoyed and devoured every word.

Having first read "Brick Lane" by Monica Ali at the peak of its frenzy and hype, I was keen to read another book by Ali. In some ways, "Love Marriage" is a more accessible book. It portrays the modern family - different faces, backgrounds and problems. It shows us that we should not judge others or take people for granted. Everyone has a story to tell, some more dark than others. The variety of characters are a joy, from the serious Baba to the eccentric Flame. Definitely worth a read.

In 'Love Marriage' Monica Ali tells the story of Yasmin and Joe, two young doctors who have recently got engaged. Yasmin is from a fairly traditional Muslim family where nothing is spoken of. Joe is from an a liberal elite family, where his mother, Harriet, is a renowned feminist and has published an article including a picture of her private parts, easily located on the internet. On the way to a dinner party with Harriet, Yasmin feels shame in response to her mother having packed a large bag full of curry filled tupperware. Things unravel spectacularly and unpredictably from there.

For me, this fantastic novel explores identity, and the way in which being forced into certain roles by others perceptions of us, can be limiting and toxic. All of the characters struggle with this and to a certain extent rebel against the constraints. Yasmin is a deeply likeable and humanly flawed protagonist and whilst she is the main character, other people also have their say. Whilst race and people's constructions of it are a strong theme in the book, other aspects of people's identity are also explored.

I am looking forward to this novel coming out, so I can share it with people. I suspect it will win Ali a lot of plaudits and prizes.