Love and Marriage by Monica Ali

The author writes what she knows, which is being a Bangladeshi born woman who grew up in England. This book is set in London in the wake of the Brexit vote and centers on Yasmin, a trainee doctor who is the daughter of Bengali immigrants. She’s about to marry her colleague, Joe, who lives with his subtly domineering mother, Harriet, a feminist academic still famous for posing nude in her 70s heyday. The setup starts off as a meet-the-parents comedy quickly becomes something quite serious indeed. The breezy tone soon give way to the drama of a busy plot rife with secrets and lies. Yasmin gets a shock when a nurse on her ward lifts the lid on Joe’s double life, foreshadowed in segments told from his therapist’s point of view. An even more seismic upset follows the revelation that her parents’ cross-class marriage was a murkier affair than let on by the family lore of an unarranged love match. The whole mess is revealed, and the engagement is the least of the things that end up unraveled at the end.