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Seth’s magnum opus seamlessly blends the intensely intimate with the audaciously panoramic as the quest to find Lata a ‘suitable’ husband collides with a widescreen retelling of a nascent Indian state in the first faltering years of independence. A Suitable Boy stands as an example of the seemingly impossible: an extremely long book without a single wasted sentence.
A modern classic, this epic tale of families, romance and political intrigue never loses its power to delight and enchant readers.
Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: the tale of Lata - and her mother's - attempts to find her a suitable husband, through love or through exacting maternal appraisal. At the same time, it is the story of India, newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis as a sixth of the world's population faces its first great general election and the chance to map its own destiny.
Publisher: Orion Publishing Co
ISBN: 9781780227894
Number of pages: 1504
Weight: 1030 g
Dimensions: 198 x 134 x 62 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
The best writer of his generation - The 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
Not merely one of the longest novels in English; it may also prove to be the most fecund as well as the most prodigious work of the latter half of [the twentieth] century - The TImes
A quietly monumental novel . . . [Seth] has given that unlikeliest of hybrids, a modest tour de force - TLS
An immensely enjoyable novel which describes with unhurried pace the panorama of India . . . Everything appears familiar to us, yet in fact it is newly minted by a master artist - Hindustan Times
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
A phenomenon, a prodigy, a marvel of 19th century storytelling in the language of today . . . It is hard to believe that Seth is only one man. He writes with the omniscience and authority of a large, orderly committee of experts on Indian politics, law, medicine, crowd psychology, urban and rural social customs, dress, cuisine, horticulture, funerary rites, cricket and even the technicalities of shoe manufacture - Evening Standard
Twentieth anniversary-edition of Seth's masterly hymn to life and love set against the backdrop of an independent India. - THE OBSERVER
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