Love Marriage
Long-listed for the Orange Prize… Washington Post Book World Best Books of 2008… Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Book
“Innovative… this is an ambitious family drama about an underreported part of the world, filled with well-shaded characters [and] gorgeous flourish…Buy it.” —New York Magazine
In this globe-scattered Sri Lankan family, we speak only of two kinds of marriage. The first is the Arranged Marriage. The second is the Love Marriage. In reality, there is a whole spectrum in between, but most of us spend years running away from the first towards the second. [p. 3]
Yalini, the daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants who left their collapsing country and married in America, finds herself caught between the history of her ancestors and her own modern world. But when she is summoned to Toronto to help care for her dying uncle, Kumaran, a former member of the militant Tamil Tigers, she is forced to see that violence is not a relic of the Sri Lankan past, but very much a part of her Western present.
While Kumaran’s loved ones gather around him to say goodbye, Yalini traces her family’s roots—and the conflicts facing them as ethnic Tamils—through a series of marriages. Now, as Kumaran’s death and his daughter’s politically motivated nuptials edge closer, in the tradition of her family, Yalini too must decide where she stands.
Lyrical and innovative, V. V. Ganeshananthan’s novel brilliantly unfolds how a new generation of war both forms and fractures families.
International Publications
Published internationally by Garzanti (Italy), JC Lattes (France), Weidenfeld & Nicholson (the U.K. and associated territories), Rao (Romania), Random House (Germany), Hachette (India), and Stylos (Serbia).