The Newlyweds
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- 8,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
From Nell Freudenberger, one of America's most dazzling talents, comes The Newlyweds, an utterly captivating cross-continental love story
Amina Mazid is twenty-four when she leaves Bangladesh for Rochester, New York, and for George Stillman, the husband who met and wooed her online. It's a twenty-first-century romance that echoes ancient traditions - the arranged marriages of her home country. And though George falls for Amina because she doesn't 'play games', they will both hide a secret, and vital, part of their lives from each other.
A brilliantly observed, wry and yet deeply moving novel about the exhilerations - and complications - of getting, and staying, wed, The Newlyweds is a tour de force - a novel as rich with misunderstandings as it is with unlikely connections.
'Young writers as ambitious - and as good - as Nell Freudenberger give us reason for hope', New York Times Book Review
'Freudenberg has rare humanity, and talent great enough to command not only a vast landscape of imbalance and misunderstanding, but also a tender sphere of tiny intimacy, hidden yearning...A marvellous book', Kiran Desai, winner of the MAN Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss
Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novel The Dissident, (longlisted for the Orange Prize) and the story collection Lucky Girls, winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and shortlisted for the Orange New Writers' Prize and a New York Times Book Review Notable Book. She was named a New Yorker '20 Under 40' writer and one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Freudenberger's delicately observed second novel is another account of cross-cultural confusion in the tale of a Bangladeshi woman, 24-year-old Amina Mazid, who becomes the e-mail order bride of 34-year-old George Stillman, an electrical engineer in Rochester, N.Y. Arriving in snowy Rochester in 2005 is a culture shock for Amina, but within three years she has her green card, is married to George, and is taking college courses when not pulling espresso at Starbucks. Her marriage, though, has its problems. Sex is awkward, George loses his job, and Amina discovers something that makes her doubt his sincerity. She eventually returns to Bangladesh to bring her parents to the U.S., but a problem with her father's visa keeps Amina there and forces her back into the morass of her extended family's resentments and petty jealousies, all of which she'd hoped to escape in marriage. Add to her troubles an old suitor, Nasir, waiting not so patiently in the wings. Freudenberger (The Dissident) does an excellent job of portraying the plight of a young Muslim woman not totally comfortable in either of the worlds she inhabits. But Amina's passivity may frustrate many readers, and George is a complete cipher. In the end, Freudenberg's anatomy of a modern arranged marriage is somewhat too dependent on cultural clich s to entirely satisfy.
