Love Marriage is the first novel of promising young writer V.V. Ganeshananthan. What began as her Harvard senior thesis has blossomed into a multi-generational, multicultural tale of love, tradition, and family.

The fictional story unfolds through the eyes of Yalini, an American-born daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants. As Yalini reveals the secrets of her family's past in Sri Lanka, including the story of her uncle, a former militant Tamil Tiger, readers witness her internal struggle between American modernity and the customs of her ancestors. The thread of differing types of marriages (arranged, love, self-arranged, outside, cousin, village, abroad, without consent, under pressure, proper and improper) unites the pieces of her relative's stories that she can wheedle out of her close-lipped parents. For the rest, she must rely on her dying uncle, whose time is quickly coming to a close.

Reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, Ganeshananthan's Love Marriage has the capability to transcend American indifference, quietly sharing the background and history of a culture frequently identified as the enemy. The novel, well researched and magnificently crafted, will surely (and thankfully) not be the last we see from Ganeshananthan.

Many thanks to LibraryThing and Random House for providing me with an Advance Reader's Edition of this book through the Early Reviewers program. More of my book reviews can be found at