The Immigrant by Manju Kapur

Synopsis :

 Nina is a thirty year old English lecturer in Delhi, living with her widowed mother.  When an arranged marriage is proposed with Ananda, a family acquaintance living in Canada, Nina is uncertain : can she really give up her home and career to build a new life in Canada with a husband she barely knows?

 The consequences of her marriage are far greater than she ever could have imagined.  From what she eats to what she wears, Nina's whole world is thrown into question.  As certain truths unfold about Ananda and their relationship, she realises that establishing a new life will cost more than she expected - and that some things can  never be left behind.
Here we go again, anther Asian related book which, at times, I really want to stay far away from.  Nothing really wrong with them but they just tends to be fixated on the theme of family, being filial and for even grown up kids to be still under the thumb of their family.

 The Immigrant does have such elements but wasn't really fixated on these elements such was it's saving grace.  Even then, it wasn't really that much of a saving grace as the characters where not appealing and rather self centered in my opinion.

 Nina and Ananda went through what was termed an arrange marriage. The author must be using this term rather loosely as from what I know, the marriage wasn't really arranged the traditional way such Indian marriages are arranged normally.

 Nina and Ananda have opportunity to date and correspond with each other and for some reason, I think they just go ahead with it because there's no one else for them. For Nina, she just wants to please her widowed mother and worried that she would end up being unmarried since her age is considered not young in her society.  For Ananda, he just wanted a wife from his home country, to fulfill what's expected from him.

 I can't say things work out well for them but then if all is well, we would not have this book to read now, would we?  I read The Immigrant while on work travel recently and I can say it fulfilled my expectation of it.

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