THE PURSUIT OF HAPPY ENDINGS

CHETAN BHAGAT'S LATEST WORK OF FICTION IS A TRAGI-COMIC ROMANCE BETWEEN UNLIKELY PARTNERS, WHICH NEVERTHELESS ENDS ON A NOTE OF HOPE

- 

A typical day in Chetan Bhagat's life as a writer is “a mix of staring at a blank screen, overthinking life choices, and then magically writing something meaningful at a random hour”.

“Not glamorous but deeply satisfying on the good days,” he says in an email interview to INDIA TODAY. It must have been on those good days that the bestselling Bhagat tapped out his latest novel—12 Years: My Messed-Up Love Story—which decodes love and relationships with unsparing existential clarity, and a joke or two.

12 YEARS My Messed-up Love Story By Chetan Bhagat HARPER FICTION ₹399; 432 pages

It’s the unlikely love story of the recently divorced and mildly impoverished Saket Khurana, who has given up a hotshot career and a life in California to take a stab at stand-up comedy in Mumbai, and Payal Jain, on the cusp of an illustrious life in private equity, who hails from a conservative and controlling family and has never had a boyfriend. He is 33. She is 21. With a 12-year age gap, alluded to in the book’s title but which also references the time period over which the events in the book play out, what could go wrong? As it turns out, everything that you can possibly think of.