Hachette India

The Sweet And Simple Kind

Yasmine Gooneratne

Loyalty (and the damnable lack of it in his wife) was the thought uppermost in the mind of Sir Andrew Millbanke as he looked down at Lady Alexandra's dead body, spread-eagled on the paved pathway of the Residency.'

And so begins an engrossing and dramatic family drama, set against the backdrop of Ceylon's bumpy evolution into Sri Lanka, as the Wijesinha clan struggle to balance their staunch political ambition against the ignominy of an embarrassing family scandal. And when two young family members, cousins Tsunami and Latha, meet and become firm friends no one can guess that their triumphant friendship will be played out over the passing years against both the best and the worst the newly independent Sri Lanka can offer as these two smart and Westernised young women pursue their own personal freedoms.

Yasmine Gooneratne

Born in Colombo educated at the Universities of Ceylon and Cambridge Emeritus Professor Yasmine Gooneratne has taught researched and published in the fields of English and Commonwealth/PostcolonialLiterature for 35 years. On her return from Cambridge with a PhD. in English she taught at the University of Ceylon inPeradeniya for 10 years (1962 - 1972) before accepting a senior position atMacquarie University in Australia where she taught until her retirement from active teaching in 1999. She had been writing verse since her schooldays in Sri Lanka and she beganwriting fiction while teaching in Australia. Her publications (both fiction and non-fiction) are listed below with publication detailsprovided. Her work as writer and teacher has been recognized by the award of a Personal Chair in English aswell as of Macquarie University's first higher doctoral degree (D.Litt.). She has been honoured in three countries by conferment of the Orderof Australia (AO) the Samvad IndiaFoundation's Raja Rao Award and the Sahityaratna ('Jewel of Literature') Award of Sri Lanka. Patron since 1990 of the Jane Austen Society of Australia she is today the director of The GuardianAngels a literary editing service and a member of both the Australian Society of Authors and the English Writers' Cooperative of Sri Lanka. All her novels (including the first which won Australia's Marjorie Barnard Literary Prize for Fiction) have been shortlisted for international prizes among them the CommonwealthWriters Prize and the Dublin IMPAC International Prize.