A SUITABLE BOY

A Suitable Boy took the world by storm when it was first published. Twenty years later Vikram Seth’s epic masterpiece retains its power to delight and amaze.

‘Set in post-independence India, the novel follows for eighteen months or so four linked families in Calcutta, the province of Purva Pradesh and its capital Brahmpur, and the cities—Delhi, Kanpur, Lucknow—trawled by the heroine’s mother in her search for a “suitable boy”… But the greatness of the novel, its unassailable truthfulness, owes less to research than to imagination, an instinctive knowledge of the human heart—with all its varieties of kindness and cruelty, its capacity for hurt… As with all the best books, one feels only dismay when the pages on the right of the tome start thinning out.’—The 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

‘So vast and so amiably peopled [A Suitable Boy] is a long, sweet, sleepless pilgrimage to life. [The novel] covers India like a sun, warming a whole country in its historical rays It is almost impossible to imagine an unswayed reader.’—Guardian