Since her days in the orphanage, Latha has been a companion and servant to Thara, a more fortunate girl her own age. But since her trip to the hill country when she caught her first glimpse of a rose, Latha has known she was destined for a better life. For now, she must watch silently as Thara receives all the luxuries Latha is denied, consoled only by the rose-scented soap stolen from the bathroom of her master's house.

Years and miles away, Biso, a desperate young mother, flees from her murderous husband, taking her children with her to the remote hills. As Biso and Latha journey towards their separate fates, struggling to hold on to their independence, each will betray the people they love, changing the course of their lives for ever.

A Disobedient Girl is an epic, heartbreaking novel about the linked destinies of two women, set against the backdrop of beautiful, politically turbulent Sri Lanka.

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She loved fine things and she had no doubt that she deserved
them. That is why it had not felt like stealing when she’d helped
herself to one of the oval cakes that were stacked in the cabinet underneath
the bathroom sink in the main house. Who would care if
one went missing from the seven sitting there, awaiting their turn in
the rectangular ceramic soap dish bought at Lanka Tiles to match the
new pale green bathroom towels? And, since she had been right and
nobody had noticed, it was now a reliable source of luxury. When
one wore out, which it didn’t for several months, she simply fetched
herself another.
Every day, at 3:30 pm, she cleaned her face, feet, underarms, and
hands at the well, using one of those cakes of Lux, which, despite
having escaped, undetected, with thieving, not daring to smell like
flowers all day long, she reserved for this ritual. Every day the soap,
pink and fragranced, filled her nostrils with the idea of roses. She
had seen real roses only once. That had been when the Vithanages
had taken her with them on a trip to the hill country one April. She
had been five or six then, her second year with them, back when her
duties had been few and blissfully pleasing. The hill country, with
its lush, verdant cleanliness, the ice-cold
brooks, and the famous Diyaluma waterfall,
at whose foot she had stood as part of the family,
all their faces sprayed with mist, wet with the tears that the particular
slant of the falls, airbrushed water in slow motion, invariably brought
on. After the falls, they had driven down for a picnic at the gardens
in Hakgala, where the roses bloomed in such perfection that only
their scent distinguished them from the artificial creations sold in Colombo.
From that day on, roses had become a delicious prospect—
a memory and a luxury blending together on her face, caressing her.
Today, as always, she felt sad as the relatively warm well water took
the bubbles and the smell down the sloped pavement and evaporated
both instantly between the blades of grass at her feet. She straightened
up and looked off into the distance, smelling the tendrils of hair
that hung long and wet down both sides of her face; she used her
left hand to gather the strands nudging her right cheek, that being a
more dramatic gesture, she thought, than using her right hand. This
was the moment when, in her soggy state, she imagined herself into
a teledrama, playing the role of the beautiful yet discarded maiden,
surrounded by the soft aura of the virtuous wronged.
Next to the presence of finery, she also felt, quite strongly, that
her life should unfold with a minimum of three square helpings of
drama, as soul minding and body feeding as the plate of rice or bread
she was given at each meal. The old well at the edge of the garden,
which was used only for washing clothes and, in her case, for bathing,
and which therefore she considered an extension of the spaces
that belonged to her, was the perfect place to dwell on those fantasies
and to populate them with characters propelled by passion, wrongdoing,
and guts.