A Convenient Marriage by my alter ego Jeevani Charika is released on Thursday and, in order to celebrate, a few of my author friends are joining me in a blog splash.

We are blogging around three main prompts. Since I set them, it’s only fair that I answer all three:

1.       Both Chaya and Gimhana make huge decisions in their lives to please their families. What’s the strangest thing you’ve done because of your family? …

This was really hard. It’s not strange, as such, but one thing I did was study science. I was good at English and I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I was also good at science. My father suggested I do science, so that I can get a real job and then write in my ‘spare time’. So that’s what I did. Studying science at university, meant that I had to stop writing for a long time. But it also meant that I can work part time using my science, which is handy for keeping the wolf from the door. It also means I can give my heroines sciencey professions. Chaya studied Biochemistry and microbiology, just like I did. We are supposed to write what we know, so I gave her my subjects. I gave Gimhana my foodie tendencies and my love of Jem and the Holograms.

2.       One of the ways Gimhana shows he cares is by cooking for Chaya.  Is there a food that evokes particular memories for you? …

Outside school in Colombo, there were street vendors who sold mangoes – not the ripe, juicy ones you’re thinking of, oh no. These mangoes were green and unripe, they were peeled and sliced partway, so that you could hold the base and tear strips of it off to eat. You dipped them in a mixture of salt and chili powder. They cost about 5 rupees, as I recall. They’re an intense burst of salt, sour heat.

These days, I don’t eat much salt and sometimes I get a craving for crisps. Knowing that the thing I’m really craving is salt, I chop up an apple and dip the slices in salt. Every time I pop one in my mouth, I am reminded of the street vendors mangoes and hot, sticky days taking the van home from school, made even stickier by a green mango and bag of chili and salt.

3.       This book spans seventeen years – If you could talk to your younger self from 20 years ago, what would you tell them?

First of all, it came as a bit of shock to realise that 20 years ago, I was already an adult! I would have been a grad student, already in love with the fellow grad student I would marry, and rapidly realising that academia was too confrontational for me. Apart from reassuring my younger self that things would be okay, I would tell her to write more. When I was an undergraduate, I didn’t write fiction. Partly, this was because I didn’t think I was good enough. Surely, I thought, all the clever people doing English would be able to write amazing prose and even if I did submit something to one of the student newspapers, they’d reject it… so I didn’t. It was only as a grad student that I started writing again. Still not fiction – I wrote film and restaurant reviews for the Oxford Daily Information sheet (It was a wonderful thing – brightly coloured A3 sheets that came out daily and were distributed around town). I’d tell my younger self to be brave and join a creative writing group; to write fiction and to meet other writers. If I’d done that, I might have ended up with useful connections. As it happens, I didn’t know anyone who had anything to do with publishing when I left uni. I had to network from the ground up. Thank goodness for the RNA, which was the most fun networking I’ve ever done.

A Convenient Marriage will be released on the 14th of November. This was the first novel I wrote and it has a special place in my heart.

It was the perfect marriage… until they fell in love.

Chaya is a young woman torn between her duty to family and her life in the UK. While her traditional Sri Lankan parents want her to settle down into marriage, what they don’t know is that Chaya has turned away the one true love of her life, Noah, terrified of their disapproval.

Gimhana is hiding his sexuality from his family. It’s easy enough to pretend he’s straight when he lives half a world away in the UK. But it’s getting harder and harder to turn down the potential brides his parents keep finding for him.

When Chaya and Gimhana meet, a marriage of convenience seems like the perfect solution to their problems. Together they have everything – friendship, stability and their parents’ approval. But when both Chaya and Gimhana find themselves falling in love outside of their marriage, they’re left with an impossible decision – risk everything they’ve built together, or finally follow their heart?

Buy link : https://books2read.com/AConvenientMarriage