The next book to be featured on the Radio 2 Book Club with Steve Wright will be Love Marriage, the long-anticipated new novel from Monica Ali. The book was released on 3 February and Monica will be on the show with Steve on Wednesday 23 February.
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We have an exclusive extract available for you to read.
Love Marriage
Yasmin Ghorami has a lot to be grateful for: a loving family, a fledgling career in medicine, and a charming, handsome fiancé, fellow doctor Joe Sangster.
But as the wedding day draws closer and Yasmin’s parents get to know Joe’s firebrand feminist mother, both families must confront the unravelling of long-held secrets, lies and betrayals.
As Yasmin dismantles her own assumptions about the people she holds most dear, she’s also forced to ask herself what she really wants in a relationship and what a ‘love marriage’ actually means.
Love Marriage is a story about who we are and how we love in today’s Britain – with all the complications and contradictions of life, desire, marriage and family. What starts as a captivating social comedy develops into a heart-breaking and gripping story of two cultures, two families and two people trying to understand one another.
Selection panel review
The book was selected with the help of a panel of library staff from across the UK. Our readers loved Love Marriage – here are some of their comments:
“Monica Ali bowled me along in this cleverly woven narrative of two families, one Indian and one from the British upper-middle class. Stereotypes are rolled out and exploded, but without minimising the impact of underlying prejudices and familial pressures, and I couldn’t put it down. The narrative is deeply personal and by the end I was rooting for all her characters.”
“I absolutely LOVED this one. I couldn’t put it down, in fact. An interesting exploration of two very different families; full of drama and pathos. The characters are complex yet relatable and full of heart. The book will provide loads of great talking points for a book group.”
About the author
Monica Ali is an award-winning, bestselling writer whose work has been translated into twenty-six languages. Her debut novel, Brick Lane, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and described by James Wood as ‘a great achievement of the subtlest storytelling’. She followed it up with a novel-in-stories, Alentejo Blue, In the Kitchen and Untold Story.
Monica Ali was chosen as one of Granta’s 2003 Best of Young British Novelists. She has judged a number of literary prizes including as Chair of the Asian Man Booker. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including the Guardian, The Times, the New Yorker and the New York Times. Monica has been a guest editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, and has presented several editions of the Radio 4 show, A Point of View. She is a Fellow of the RSA and of the Orwell Prize. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University, New York, and was, from 2015 to 2018, Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Surrey. Monica is a Trustee of the St Giles Trust, a charity that helps ex-offenders and other marginalised and disadvantaged people in the UK.
Get involved
Tune in to the Steve Wright show on Wednesday 23 February to hear a live interview with Monica.
Have you read Love Marriage, or Monica’s other books? You can share your thoughts with us on Twitter using #R2BookClub and #LoveMarriage. You can also follow Little Brown.
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