Marriage of a Thousand Lies by S.J. Sindu

These family struggles make it more difficult for Lucky to fully come out of the closet. Lucky's mother is divorced and her father remarried her mother's best friend, while her sister Vidya ran away from home after falling in love with an American boy. While Lucky's mother and sister are heterosexual, they both live outside of expected female roles. In addition to Lucky and Krishna's arrangement, Lucky discovers how other members of her family imperfectly balance traditional roles with their own desires. Sindu's narrative highlights how members of the South Asian queer community negotiate cultural norms that strictly delineate expressions of love and fidelity differently from each other. After Nisha's engagement party, Kris tells her, ''Because of me, you can seem like the perfect little brown wife.'' The façade Lucky wears gradually hardens and cracks as she discovers that she has been lying to herself as much as to her family and friends. Both Kris and Lucky chafe under the pressure to conform to her family's expectations. Lucky hides imperfectly within her own marriage to Krishna, a gay man, an arrangement that allows them to remain members of their Sri Lankan-American community. The moment causes her to realize her love for her best friend, Nisha, and pries loose a thread that slowly unravels over the course of the novel as she comes to terms with Nisha's upcoming arranged marriage. Sindu's stunning debut novel, the narrator, Lucky, recounts an anecdote of how when she was a girl, she asked her mother for a button-down shirt to wear for a school play, a request that was her first lie.

Marriage of a Thousand Lies by S.J. Sindu