If you learn anything from reading romance novels, it's that true love happens unexpectedly. For Sonali Dev, it happened about ten years ago, when she was sick in bed with a 102-degree fever and nothing to read. She asked her husband, Manoj Thatte, to pick something up for her when he took their kids to the library. He came back with a cheap paperback with the title stamped on the cover in gold foil. It was calledRosehaven, and it was by Catherine Coulter. It was the story of a spirited heiress in 13th-century England, the warrior she is forced to wed, and their estate full of adorable animals. Dev still has no idea why her husband chose this particular book; she suspects he'd forgotten his mission until he reached the checkout line and then grabbed the first thing he saw. She was annoyed. "Ten years you've been married to me," she told him, "and you think this is what I read?"
"This" was a romance novel. When Dev, now 44, was growing up in Mumbai, nobody she knew read books like that, and neither did she; even after she moved to America following her marriage, she continued to avoid them. Romance novels were not books for serious people. They had happy endings. They had too much sex and people talking about their feelings and ridiculously muscled men and beautiful women with purple eyes.
What she loved were the Bollywood films she grew up watching: tales of beautiful people kept apart by fate (or absurdly complicated circumstances), beset by emotions so powerful they can only express themselves through elaborate song-and-dance numbers, until true love triumphs in the end. She'd even tried her hand at writing a few scripts for her best friend, Rupali Mehta, a Bollywood producer, but they never made it out of the development phase.
And then came the fateful day her husbnd brought her Rosehaven. She was desperate for reading material, so she decided she'd give it a look anyway. Coulter is considered one of the masters of the genre, and Dev succumbed almost immediately. It kept her up all night.
It wasn't just the sex, or even that the book was a welcome distraction from her illness. Rosehaven gave her pleasure on a far deeper level. Here was a story where, at last, the woman was just as important as the man and didn't have to passively wait for him to choose her. Even more than that, it confirmed some of her most optimistic thoughts about the world: that love can bring out the best in people, can inspire them to be courageous and selfless, and can even create the kind of joy that makes people want to throw out their arms and sing.
"You're not going to believe this," she told her friend Mehta the next time they spoke, "but there's an entire genre of books that feel exactly likeBollywood movies!"
Dev decided she was going to start writing these kinds of books herself. Here was an opportunity to tell the same sort of stories she'd been trying to tell with her Bollywood scripts, but in much greater depth and detail. She finished the first draft of what would become her second published novel in the spring of 2010 and joined the Romance Writers of America to learn more about the craft and business of romance writing. She signed a contract with Kensington Publishing, one of the largest romancepublishers, three years later. All in all, she says, she's been spectacularly fortunate.
Her first book (which was actually the second she finished), A Bollywood Affair, appeared in the fall of 2014 to almost universally glowing reviews; it ended up on several year-end lists of best books and was a finalist for aRITA, the RWA industry award, for Best First Novel. The Bollywood Bridecame out last year to similar acclaim—and better sales. Dev's third novel, A Change of Heart, debuts next week, and has already received starred notices from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist, three of the most important early reviewers. In the world of romance, she's a star, praised equally for her writing and her warm and bubbly personality, which comes through on social media and in blog posts. In person, she's petite and stylish, earnest and unassuming. She speaks in a soft voice with a slightMumbai accent. You want good things to happen to her.
Dev's editor at Kensington, Martin Biro, says that he's the lucky one. He met Dev at the RWA's Chicago Spring Fling conference in 2013, where he was part of a panel of Kensington editors recruiting new authors. As he recalls it, during the Q-and-A period, Dev shyly told him she'd written a book set in Bollywood, but she wasn't sure if it was worth publishing. It was the word "Bollywood" that caught Biro's attention. "That sounds amazing," he remembers telling her. "Come talk to me.
