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.
Reviews
The Independent
Susie Boyt
“It is daring for an American novelist who lives in Brooklyn to write from the point of view of a Bangladeshi woman and to attempt such an interior view of family ties in Bangladesh. Yet Freudenberger approaches her subject with great sensitivity, a heavy sense of the seriousness of life - and much wry humour.”
04/08/2012
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Times Literary Supplement
Fran Bigman
“Like many immigrant novels (Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Rose Tremain’s The Road Home), The Newlyweds is straightforwardly written, in the assumption that the newness of the New World seen through Amina’s eyes will furnish awe enough. Yet several aspects of The Newlyweds make it a refreshing addition to the genre. This is a story not of immigration to the metropole, where diversity is unavoidable but of adjustment to uppermiddle-class suburban America, where Amina is able to avoid the immigrant communities of less affluent nearby towns in an attempt to carve out her own American life, while practising her own quiet form of faith.”
17/08/2012
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The Economist
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“Ms Freudenberger’s gifts as a writer are in spinning yarns that are engrossing and wise, with just enough suspense to build in momentum.”
18/08/2012
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The Los Angeles Times
Jane Ciabattari
“For all its global sophistication, the most remarkable accomplishment of this hugely satisfying novel is Freudenberger's subtle exploration of the stage of adulthood at the heart of The Newlyweds and all the compromises with selfhood those early years of love and marriage entail.”
03/06/2012
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The Daily Mail
Harry Ritchie
“In her second novel, Nell Freudenberger has come up with a convincing and rather compelling story of a very modern marriage, and in Amina she’s created a properly three-dimensional character and a real heroine to root for.”
26/07/2012
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The New York Times
Mohsin Hamid
“At moments the truthlikeness of The Newlyweds falters, when its perspectives seem to belong more properly to its author than to Amina. Yet as Freudenberger writes (of Amina, but perhaps also of herself): “She had the strange feeling she was lying, even as she told . . . the truth.” And truths are indeed present in this novel — in its cleareyed openness and compassion toward the world, in its nuanced and human representation of Muslim characters and their varying Islams, and in the understanding and sympathy it displays for the nostalgia of migrants, which is to say for all human beings, even those who are born and die in the same town and travel only in time.”
26/04/2012
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The New York Times
Michiko Kakutani
“The Newlyweds, Nell Freudenberger’s affecting if sometimes ungainly new novel, starts off as a sort of high-concept Hollywood movie, mashing up the familiar fish-out-of-water story line with a girl-torn-between-two-boys plot. What all feels a bit like a paint-by-numbers exercise, however, gradually opens out into a genuinely moving story about a woman trying to negotiate two cultures, balancing her parents’ expectations with her own aspirations, her ambition and cynical practicality with deeper, more romantic yearnings.”
24/04/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Catherine Taylor
“Freudenberger’s depiction of Bangladesh, the interlocking of country and society, is uncanny, though the idea for this book germinated from a young Deshi woman she met on a plane, US-bound as – essentially – an email bride. While lacking the effortless prose style of Jhumpa Lahiri, or the political engagement of Tahmima Anam, the richness and restraint displayed here recall Vikram Seth’s epic of pragmatism, A Suitable Boy.”
02/08/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Tim Martin
“Freudenberger has more to get her teeth into in the Bangladesh sections, but she’s never totally successful at turning Amina's story, which is essentially about waiting — for replies from George, for pregnancy, for her parents’ visas — into one about action. Neither the book’s second love story nor a vague plot of generational revenge within Amina’s family have the force or insight that Freudenberger strikes from her protagonist in the most mundane of situations, meaning that this intriguing novel’s finest moments come from sudden felicities of phrasing, flashes of empathetic insight and constant attention paid to how our surroundings come to shape us.”
02/08/2012
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The Times
Sarah Vine
“Rather like its heroine, what started out as a rather prim and buttoned-up book is transformed into a wonderfully fast-paced emotional adventure that leads to all kinds of unexpected, but never unlikely — and never dull — conclusions.”
28/07/2012
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The Independent on Sunday
Kunal Duttal
“The chapters zip along with purpose and the novel flits effortlessly between the false intimacy of suburban America and the closely knit gossipy communities of Dhaka where Amina returns in the second half. If there are two flaws, they are that some of the characters are underdeveloped, while the homage to Starbucks, intended as a US reference point, reads more like a state-sponsored advertorial. But what this book does so well is articulate the challenges of mixed marriages in the digital age.”
05/08/2012
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The Sunday Times
Lucy Atkins
“This is all undeniably enjoyable and beautifully written. And yet there is a slightly flat feeling when the book is over. This, perhaps, is because the author is tiptoeing through a minefield of political correctness. Everyone’s position must be honoured; nothing and nobody dismissed or villainised. Big plot questions are left hanging, as if it would somehow be rude to come down on either side. ”
29/07/2012
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The Guardian
Laura Miller
“An accomplished if overlong piece of literary naturalism, The Newlyweds feels rather old-fashioned, as if, like Amina, it were a visitor from another country. That would be the country where readers are willing to devote themselves to many pages of expertly rendered depictions of suburban life and the intricacies of everyday marital relations without much indication of where all of it is heading. It's the sort of novel you admire even as you admit you aren't especially curious to know what happens next.”
09/08/2012
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The Financial Times
Philip Hensher
“The Newlyweds is not exactly a bad novel, but it is limited in its analysis. Nearly a century after Forster in A Passage to India regretted that no friendship could exist between east and west – “No, not yet” – it seems as large a challenge as ever for a writer to conceive of a Bengali woman’s thoughts when they are not concerned with western preoccupations. The limitations of The Newlyweds suggest that, when Asian and western experiences rub up against each other, this may no longer produce anything more than a set of banal observations.”
03/08/2012
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