Love Marriage

Monica Ali (Virago, £18.99)

MONICA ALI’S debut novel, the Bookershortlisted Brick Lane (2003), was a massive, beautifully written hit, about a Bangladeshi woman who had arrived, bewildered, in East London for an arranged marriage. Here, the heroine, Yasmin, an Indian Muslim, is in a different position; she is in love with her handsome English fiancé, Joe (both are junior doctors). She imagines that she is following her parents’ trailblazing path, having been reared on the romance of her mother, from a well-to-do Bengali family, falling for an impoverished rickshaw driver who transformed into a doctor.

The book, the author’s first for a decade, begins with a hilarious first meeting of the parents at Joe’s mother’s Primrose Hill home, Yasmin crammed, mortified, in a car with a stack of Ma’s odorous Tupperware boxes of homemade pakora. Yet Harriet, an uppercrust feminist writer, proves not at all supercilious and invites Ma to talk at her next salon.

As her mother morphs from comedic, bossy Asian mother into the seer of Hampstead, her feckless brother Asif becomes weirdly respectable and Joe explores the Oedipus complex, Yasmin realises that long-held truths are disintegrating and that NHS bureaucracy is getting in the way of her job. The result is a funny and tender saga, in which every character is properly expanded, revelation follows revelation and the reader prays that love will conquer all. Wonderfully satisfying.

The result is a funny and tender saga, every character expanded