Yasmin and Joe’s relationship doesn’t depend on their families or their clashing cultures.

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.īut 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. 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. 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. Yasmin is a trained doctor spending most of her time in the geriatric wards of a hospital.

Understandably, they’re legends to their second generation children. 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. 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.

Monica ali books