A Suitable Boy

Overview

Funny and tragic, with engaging, brilliantly observed characters, Vikram Seth's epic love story set in India is as close as you can get to Dickens for the 20th century. The story unfolds through four middle class families—the Mehras, Kappoors, Khans, and Chatterjis. Lata Mehra, a university student, is under pressure from her mother to get married. But not to just anyone she happens to fall in love with. There are standards to be met and finding a husband for Lata becomes a family affair in which all the members are to play a part. In his sweeping epic, Vikram Seth has created an entire world filled with warmth, humor, pathos, and tragedy—in short, life. Recorded on location in India, A Suitable Boy is made by the production team of the award-winning Bleak House and The Handmaid's Tale. Unabridged.

Reviews

"The best writer of his generation." —Times

"This novel, so vast and so amiably peopled, is a long, sweet, sleepless pilgrimage to life . . . His novel deserves thousands of long marriages and suitable readers." —Guardian

"No one, surely, could wish this novel shorter . . . the greatness of the novel, its unassailable truthfulness, owes less to research than to imagination, an instinctive knowledge of the human heart." —Observer

"Conceived on a grand scale of the great 19th century novels - War and Peace, Middlemarch - A Suitable Boy grows to match them in breadth and depth . . . [A] massive and magnificent book." —Sunday Times

Author Biography

Vikram Seth is the bestselling author of An Equal Music, A Suitable Boy, Two Lives, and The Golden Gate.