I'd read the author's debut, My Sweet Girl, and it was one of my favourite reads of this year. And so I was really excited to read this one. And did it fail to leave a mark? No, because I absolutely loved reading this one!

I love how the author has developed Amaya's character. Amaya appears to be a vengeful woman. She fails to move on from her past and has a habit of constantly thinking about different ways to bring harm upon others. She is evidently a troubled woman. She constantly stalks Kaavindi and is obsessed with Spencer. There are many causes for her behaviour and her character is not something readers might like, but there are people like her in this world too. Not every character needs to be likable.

The best part is the narration! Amaya's character grated on me for a long time and I was so annoyed at her, but by the end of the book, my mind was blown! I loved how everything changed in those last few pages.

The book is set in Sri Lanka and humourously mocks 'big fat' Sri Lankan weddings. The weddings here in South India are also similar so I couldn't help laughing at how accurate it was! Sri Lankan culture and tradition is also described beautifully in this one.

Bottom Line - need a new amazing thriller to read? Pick this one up!

I thought I was reading an average suspense novel that was hitting all the usual tropes. I was surprised by the ending. If you want a fun page turning read pick this up.

A gripping thriller that starts on simmer and builds to a boil. Dazzlingly clever, twisting and constantly surprising

I wasn’t sure what to expect from You’re Invited but once I got into it, I found this a really entertaining, gripping read. We’re following Amaya who is heading back to her homeland of Sri Lanka for her ex-best friend Kaavi’s wedding – and we soon discover that Kaavi is getting married to Amaya’s ex-boyfriend!

I loved the setting of this book, and finding out more about Sri Lankan culture and society, especially as it’s somewhere I’ve always wanted to go. The wedding that’s being planned is incredibly fancy so we get lots of scenes demonstrating the over-the-top nature of everything from the dress to the hotel to the many parties and social events in the run-up to the big day.

There’s a good dose of mystery as we try to work out how exactly Amaya is plotting revenge – and what exactly happened all those years ago to put a stop to the friendship between these two women? There are some twists and surprises and the way Amaya narrates the story is very easy to read and conversational. You also wonder, at various points, just how reliable a narrator she is… ie. is she slightly unhinged? I personally love those kinds of narrators!

This is a fun, easy read that I raced through and I will certainly be reading more from this author. Recommended!

It starts off slow but once the story picks up... WOW. It's a tale of friendships and its many complexities, brilliantly woven into a mystery set against a stunning locale. Also love how the story is told through multiple viewpoints, which keeps you guessing. Read it in one sitting (didn't sleep much that night!)

Lots to love here. The premise for a start as what would you do if your former best friend married your ex boyfriend. That would be weird. stranger still going to the wedding. Sri lanka makes paradise turn dark and it's very dark indeed. Very twisty too. Recommended

This is the first book I’ve read written by a Amanda Jayatissa and it is truly brilliant. What incredible writing- had me hooked from the very beginning, full of plot twists and turns and dark humour. Loved the Sri Lankan cultural and traditional context pitched against the backdrop of the super wealthy .
Very well paced with a great cast of characters. Highly recommend.

Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publishers, Hodder and Stoughton, for this ARC

After seeing a lot of rave reviews I was really looking forward to this one. However it just didn't quite hit the spot for me - I found it too slow paced and none of the characters were likeable enough for me to really root for anyone.

Amaya is shocked when she receives an invite to her former best friends wedding, even more shocked when she realises that her ex boyfriend is the groom!
Amaya can’t help her self and is on the next plane to Sri Lanka, although when she gets there she doesn’t feel as welcome as she thought she’d be.
Soon enough, the bride is missing and all fingers are pointed at Amaya.

This was a good bit of fun. From the uncomfortable situation of seeing your ex marry your best friend, to being blamed for her disappearance all while trying to work out what’s actually going on. I did see the reveal coming, which was disappointing but still a good read!

An invitation to the wedding of your ex-best friend to your ex-boyfriend…. What would you do?

This storyline had me so intrigued. Add to that that the wedding is in Sri Lanka, your ex-best friend Kaavi is now famous influencer and Amaya hasn’t seen her for 5 years. Now she is headed back to Columbo from LA to stop the wedding. She soon finds herself the centre of a police investigation when the bride goes missing, and there are signs of a struggle in her room.

Dark secrets of the past are going to be revealed of course. It is a wedding, things are already stressful. I was surprised at the direction that this book went. It was a lot more than ai had expected, and it was good!! I struggled to stop reading and had to know how it was going to end.

Thanks to Hodder and Stoughton and NetGalley for my advanced copy of this book to read. Get it on your TBR now.

I was really looking forward to reading this book after being blown away by the blurb.
Sadly the book did not live up to my expectations and it was just OK.

I absolutely loved You're Invited. It is set in my most favourite place in the world, Sri Lanka, and the story kept me gripped from start to finish. I just could not put it down so I didn't and I read it in one sitting.

Thank you to NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for my ARC.

2.5 to 3 stars

The blurb of this book was amazing. A murder mystery story during a wedding! What else could I wanted?!

The problem was that the ideas were there but the execution was not great.
This book was saved by the last 30% because before that it dragged like nothing else.

Now there were some delicate subjects in this book (like domestic violence and abuse) that were treated very poorly and that also took me out of the story.

The paced was so slow, at one point I stopped caring about the story and just wanted to finish it.

Our characters were so unlikable I didn't care about any of the them, still thanks to that last 30% I ended up enjoying the book.


Overall I was so excited about this and I was left a bit disappointed.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the chance to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

I liked the setting and how the author was able to develop an entire cast of unlikable characters and keeping you reading.
It's a fast paced story and there's plenty of twists but I found the final part a bit over the top as it required a lot of suspension of belief,
I think it wll be appreciated but it wasn't my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Every now and then, I come across a book that keeps me up all night. It happens less so nowadays, but there was a time, a couple of years ago, when this was a regular occurrence. I savour it more when it happens now - perhaps because it’s a novelty. For the second time this year, the compulsive reader inside me awoke, thank to Amanda Jayatissa’s You’re Invited, a mysterious thriller set in Sri Lanka against the backdrop of a wedding.

Amaya lives a functional life in Los Angeles, many thousand miles away from home. She hasn’t been back in five years, and has no intentions of doing so until she is invited to her former best friend’s wedding. The groom is her ex-boyfriend, so naturally Amaya makes haste and heads for Colombo. Come what may, the nuptials cannot go ahead.

From the get go, we know Amaya to be socially-awkward, and while the attribute has definitely reached a point of saturation in fiction writing, Jayatissa pitches the narrative at a level where situations are never queasy enough for Amaya to just bail on them. And of course, hidden within her is a person hankering to stop a wedding at all costs.

Amaya is often a frustrating person to have to keep pace with, but that adds immensely to the experience of reading the novel. So much of what she gets up to makes you want to tear your hair out that you just go along for the ride to keep an eye on her. Strangely, given the shelves on which the novel will soon find itself, Amaya is not designed to be entirely unlikeable. Again, this might be the over-wrought hangover from Gone Girl, which continues to inspire countless insipid unreliable narrators (chief among them the protagonist of AJ Finn’s The Woman in the Window - boy, was that book just a lot of rubbish!), but to see the concept done well is becoming as much a rarity as it is to find a believable prototype of a human being in a dick-lit novel.

Jayatissa's approach to depicting Sri Lanka is what I came away admiring a lot - she refuses to turn it into some sort of novelty, and save for a few explanations, develops enough of a context around the culture of the story for one to hazard guesses as to what she might be referring to (this is admittedly easier for me, an Indian). She also has some interesting things to say about society in Sri Lanka, and melds it into the narrative well, peeling off layers as we go along.

There comes a point where, if you’ve read enough within a particular space, you can make educated guesses as to where the story is going, and You’re Invited has some such phases, though there is enough in it that packs a surprise.

Events take place swiftly, and though the Mexican standoff of a climax feels a little like a neglected road in the subcontinent, Jayatissa zooms over it with skill that matches those of a local jeep driver.

You’re Invited’s most significant success is how gripping it is - once you’ve picked it up, it’s difficult to set it down till you’ve reached the end.

3.5 stars
After reading the blurb and seeing quite a few people compare this to the Crazy Rich Asians books, which are a real favourite of mine, I decided to give this a read.
I hadn't read anything by the author before but the idea of this being set at a wedding with the bride mysteriously going missing had my attention.
I did like the short, snappy interview chapters that were woven throughout this.
Information is parsed out as the book progresses to give you more of an insight as to what is going on. But it did feel like it dragged quite a bit before it really got going.
None of the characters, even Amaya who we should technically be rooting for, are even slightly likeable.
When we get the chapters from Kaavi's perspective she is pretty horrible. And we're meant to care that she has possibly come to harm?
I really didn't like the 'reveals' about Spencer in particular. It was like, how many bad things can one man do.
Him being *spoiler alert* broke, then his parents being alive, then him blackmailing Kaavi, then him being a domestic abuser, Nadia's Dad and into children.
And how it ended felt a bit silly.
There were twists that I didn't see coming but I felt like I was just going through the motions, reading this, instead of being a thriller that I couldn't put down as I had to know how it all played out.
Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Our main character in this psychological thriller is Amaya. And she just found out her ex-bestfriend is getting married to her ex-boyfriend. You can maybe imagine how she's feeling. The book starts the morning of the wedding and it is clear something has happened and Amaya is involved. From that first chapter I was invested. I love dark and twisted thrillers and this was one of those for sure!

The book is set in Sri Lanka which made it pretty unique right away, I loved that we got a different setting. You can also tell that the author herself is from Sri Lanka. There was quite some commentary on Sri Lankan culture and traditions, which I found fascinating. It also reminded me a bit of Crazy Rich Asians in that regard.

Amaya does not come off as a likeable person, just how I like my thriller main characters to be honest. She is obsessive, her thoughts scared me a bit at times, she self harms and is involved in BDSM. But there were also this little mentions of her past that made me question how she became the way we see her now. And are Spencer (the ex-boyfriend in question) and Kaavi (the ex-bestfriend) who they are portrayed to be. You mostly see Kaavi through her social media account and through Amaya's eyes and that never gives an accurate portrayal of someone.

After that initial chapter we start three months before the wedding and we slowly make our way to the day off. In between chapters however we read investigator interview transcripts. And those definitely made me question what happened. I loved the twists and turns in this book. There were something I did see coming but others I was for sure surprised by. And isn't that the best feeling? I also thought the ending was very satisfying and not what I was expecting.

For me, at the core this book was about a -strained- friendship. There was quite some talk about the heartbreak that comes after breaking up with your best friend and I wish there were more books, movies or songs about that. Wherever you look you can find something about being heartbroken after a romantic breakup but we need meer about friend breakups!

Overall I really enjoyed this book. I couldn't put it down and finished it so fast. It was a compelling psychological thriller with an interesting setting, good twists and an unique setting. I highly recommend this one!

"What lengths would you go to stop your former best friend from marrying your ex-boyfriend?"

With an interesting premise, this promises some interesting twists and loads of drama. And while it delivers, I was still left disappointed.

If you've read enough thrillers, the story can be predictable, The narrative felt disjointed to me and I felt like the story could have been told better.

But what didn't work for me was that none of the characters were relatable or likeable. Even when they should have been.

But I did enjoy though was learning about Sri Lanka (which is similar to India), the daily life there and of course, Sri Lankan wedding culture,

Thanks to Netgalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the advanced e-copy.

2.5/5

A Wedding To Die For…
A Sri Lankan wedding to die for in this edgy suspense. When Amaya is invited to Kaavi’s extravagant wedding in Sri Lanka she is more than a little surprised. She hasn’t heard from her former friend in a long time. As she digs deeper Amaya is horrified to learn that the groom is none other than her own former boyfriend. She has to stop the wedding from taking place but her plans are soon derailed when Kaavi goes missing and is presumed dead. Worse - fingers are pointing at Amaya herself. Is Amaya being framed for her murder? An intriguing plot is populated with a well crafted cast, much atmosphere and a firm sense of place and the slow burn tension is weaved from the off, suddenly taking a sharp turn where twists come thick and fast and illusion meets reality.

TW: Self Harm

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC.

<i> You’re Invited </i> follows the story of Amaya, a Sri-Lankan woman in her late twenties living in the USA who travels back to her home country to stop her ex-best friend from marrying her ex-boyfriend. Jayatissa’s portrayal of obsession, desire, craving, infatuation, and mania was profound and remarkable. However, I felt the depiction of self harm wasn’t done well and lacked any relevance to the book/plot.

The start was a bit slow but it picked up quickly. I liked the the twists and there were many! One of the things I liked most about this book was Jayatissa’s talent to maintain the suspense throughout the story: from the beginning to the very end; almost every chapter had me racking my brain for clues and answers and every time I thought i had it figured out there was something else missing — it was very engaging.

As for the writing, it was direct and had many cultural elements to it (sinhala dialect). I particularly liked the descriptions of loss and pain, may it be platonic or romantic relationships. In addition, Jayatissa’s introduction to Sri Lanka, the customs and traditions related to weddings, the society dynamics between the rich and poor, the typical Sri Lankan “Aunty” crowd was spot on and had me laughing at times but also missing home.

Overall, this would’ve been a five star for me if not for the self harm mentions as i personally felt it was unnecessary. However, if you’re looking for a suspenseful thriller set in Sri Lanka to read this summer I highly recommend <I> You’re Invited. </I>