Butterfly Season is a short romance about a woman from Pakistan and a Pakistani man in England. It’s also a story about finding yourself, and finding the courage to live your own life.

My protagonist, Rumi, is from a conservative family, and from a culture where sex is taboo and illegal unless you’re married. Coming from this background into a modern, free relationship, Rumi has a choice to make that will affect the rest of her life.

So it’s a romance novel?
Romance and Chicklit.

What kind of readers will it appeal to?
Hopefully, to everyone. I think that South Asian readers will identify strongly with it – we all get the ‘No Sex Before Marriage’ stricture as we’ve all lived with it. I do believe that anyone interested in a glimpse of the average Pakistani family would find it enjoyable.

Aside from the social aspect of the novella, however, this is also a fun romance, so it should appeal to anyone looking for a slightly unusual love story.

We don’t think we’ve read a Pakistani romance novel before. We cannot wait to get stuck in. Tell us more about the characters we’ll meet in it.
Rumi is my main character, a 30-something woman who has spent the last 6 years caring for an ailing mother. She’s in London after her mother’s eventual death, visiting her younger sister and old friends. Rumi has been a ‘good’ girl all her life, a dutiful daughter, a loyal friend. The kind of woman everyone gets along with and whom you don’t expect will cause any waves.

It turns out that she’s not as placid as she seems.

You’ve got some insight into this culture, don’t you. Tell us about yourself.
Natasha is a pen name. I’m a graphic designer in real life, married with three cats, living in Karachi. I wrote this first book late in life (I’m 40), just to see if I could put together a whole story and I ended up learning a lot about myself. I love writing, you see. I thought, as a designer, that I was doing something I loved, but this is even better. There’s so much creative control and freedom in writing that I can’t find as a designer (where I’m bogged down by what the client likes). I know I can’t stop now, and I’m already halfway through a second romance, and have plotted out the storyline for an epic fantasy.

That’s great.
Do you have a website?
http://dearrumi.com.

How can we follow you on Twitter and/or Facebook?
On Twitter: @NatashaA_Author
On Facebook: https://facebook.com/tasha.author.

What’s next?
Book 2 is underway, but I don’t have a release date for it yet.

How easily do new storylines come to you? If we give you four random words – Man, Woman, Mexico, Future – can you give us a brief storyline?
Not so easily, but I’ll give it a try:

A female tourist in Mexico witnesses a public hanging in a small town square. Pushed into the front, she catches the dying man’s eye and is shocked when he looks straight at her and yells, ‘She has it now!’ The townsfolk move away from her, leaving her standing alone as the lever drops the man’s body through a trapdoor, snapping his neck. Terrified, she runs back to the guesthouse where she’s staying. She doesn’t know it yet, but the small hotel is run by the hanged man’s brother, and the town is seeking a crazy secret that could affect their entire future…

Woah, that’s exciting. What happens next?
I’m good at starting plots, but have to think a little when it comes to ending them!