LOVE MARRIAGE

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.