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i'm excited to be here today with falgany kothari who who's the author of five novels and many stories, some unconventional love stories, some fantasy tales, all influenced by her South Asian heritage and her ex-pet experiences.

Her latest book, The Object of Your Affections, comes out February 19th, 2019, very soon, an award-winning classical and ballroom dancer originally from Mumbai. She

currently lives in New York. So welcome, Fulgini. Thank you. Thank you, Zabee, for having me here.

It's my pleasure to be here and talk about the object of your affections. So how did you come up

with the idea for this novel? And can you tell listeners what it's about?

Okay, so what it's about is two best friends and, you know, when you have a certain relationship with a best friend, you kind of, you know, sometimes take it to a different

level. So we have these two friends. One is married. It lives in New York City. The other one is

kind of lost because she's a widow and she's just, she has a lot of issues back at home in Mumbai and she's just immigrated to New York and try and see whether she can have a life here.

And so the friend who's married, Paris, she and her husband are trying to have a baby through surrogacy.

And she kind of has this bright idea that why not have Naira my best friend, be the mother of my child or, you know, be the gestational surrogate.

Because that's someone who she trusts implicitly and she just likes that relationship

and as you will read in the novel as the chapters go on, you realize why she wants such a

close relationship with the gestational surrogate. So that's basically the context of the book

and how did I get the idea for it? A couple of things

happened. One, that is the second book with Graydon House. So I already had my last love story,

which came out in 2018 in January. And that had two guys and a girl as a protagonist. So I kind of

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