The Newlyweds, Mansi Choksi
The Newlyweds, Mansi Choksi
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The Newlyweds
Rearranging Marriage in Modern India

Author: Mansi Choksi

Narrator: Deepti Gupta

Unabridged: 6 hr 57 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/30/2022

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

A thought-provoking and moving investigation into India as a society in transition through the lens of forbidden love, as three young couples reject arranged marriages and risk everything for true love amid social and political upheaval.

In India, two out of every three people are under the age of thirty-five. These are men and women who grew up with the internet and the advent of smartphones and social media. But when it comes to love and marriage, they’re expected to adhere to thousands of years of tradition. It’s that conflict between obeying convention and embracing modernity that drives journalist Mansi Choksi’s The Newlyweds.

In this “heart-wrenching and inspiring portrait of love under pressure” (Publishers Weekly), Choksi shines a light on three young couples who buck against arranged marriages in the pursuit of true love, illustrating the challenges, shame, anger, triumph, and loss their actions set in play.

Against the backdrop of India’s beautiful villages and cities, Choksi introduces our newlyweds. First, there’s the lesbian couple forced to flee for a chance at a life together. Then there’s the Hindu woman and Muslim man who escaped their families under the cover of night after being harassed by a violent militia group. Finally, there’s the inter-caste couple who are doing everything to avoid the same fate as a similar couple who were burned alive.

“The most nuanced, lyrical, and moving book about love and marriage in modern India yet written” (Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City), The Newlyweds raises universal questions, such as: What are we really willing to risk for love? If we’re lucky enough to find it, does it change us? If so, for the better? Or for the worse?

About Mansi Choksi

Mansi Choksi is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and two-time Livingston Award Finalist. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, National GeographicThe Atlantic, and more. She lives in Dubai with her husband and son. The Newlyweds is her first book. Follow her on Twitter @Mansi_Choksi.


Reviews

I read this—a journalistic nonfiction account of three forbidden marriages in India—shortly after The Heart Is a Shifting Sea, a similar account of three more conventional couples. On the one hand it’s readable and engaging and brings home the challenges of marriages that violate some taboo, even to......more

Goodreads review by Fanna

Finished reading this and the way it reports, relays, and reveals the lives of three Indian couples as they choose a love that's highly forbidden within the country's socio-political frame, makes it a vivid non-fiction that reads like a candid novel. rtc.......more

Goodreads review by Raven

In The Newlyweds, Mansi Choksi has brought to light a powerful and eye-opening subject that certainly, to myself and I imagine other Western readers, is both disturbing and unsettling, underscored by a delicate sliver of hope for future generations of young Indians. As Choksi writes of the general b......more

Goodreads review by Avi

As someone who doesn't have much knowledge on India and the social standards that reside in the country, this was a really insightful read. It is awful what the couples in this novel have to go through to be together and how it can bring them either closer together or further apart. It is eye openin......more