Everything you need to know about Monica Ali’s Love Marriage
Monica Ali’s debut novel, Brick Lane, was an international bestseller and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Love Marriage is her first new book in a decade. Ahead of its release, we asked Monica Ali to tell us more about it.
Tell us about Love Marriage.
Love Marriage is a story about two very different families, the Ghoramis and the Sangsters, who are thrown together by a whirlwind engagement between Yasmin and Joe. It’s a story about who we are and how we love in today’s Britain, with all the complications and contradictions of life, desire and family. It’s about love and marriage and what those things mean across different societies and different generations.
What does ‘love’ look like in Love Marriage?
Why did you choose to explore culture through the prism of marriage?
A large part of that was being a big Jane Austen fan. One of my favourite novels is Emma and Austen in all of her novels writes about engagement and marriage. Through that we learn a lot about how money functions, we learn about class and power relations and the position of women. In today’s Britain we are in a different situation but nevertheless we can see similarities and differences between groups of people and we can examine social and cultural issues through marriage just as easily today.