Love marriage by V.V. Ganeshanathan.

Ganeshanathan, V.V. Love marriage. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks,c2008.

This novel spans several generations, who have been affected by the civil war in Sri Lanka.  It portrays how an extended family copes with displacement. There is Yalini, daughter of Sri Lanakan parents, Vani and Murali, whose youth has been spent carrying the guilt of her family’s secrets.

Yalini examines her relatives’ marriages and tries to make some sense of their alliances and also find out as to why her own life has been so unsettled.  She finds out her own parents fell in love in New York and escaped an arrange marriage.  Each of her relative has their own story to tell.  Most of her relatives’ marriages are arranged – some good and some that have continued, even when should not have.

The author is able to provide an insight to the lives of people, prior to being displaced and becoming an immigrant.  The emotional scars they brought with them to their new homeland and the compromises they made to adjust to a new society and culture.  Interesting read for students wanting to know more about the ethnic war fare in Sri Lanka and the tensions between family members when they don’t subscribe to the same political ideology.

V.V. Ganeshananthan, a fiction writer and journalist, is a graduate of Harvard College,  the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the M.A. program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. andom House published her first novel, Love Marriage, in April 2008. The book was longlisted for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post Book World’s Best of 2008.