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A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy tells the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love, ambition, humor, sadness, prejudice, reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette, and the most appalling violence.
Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: the tale of Lata's—and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra's—attempts to find a suitable boy for Lata, through love or through exacting maternal appraisal. Set in the early 1950s in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, this compelling story takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves.
"[Seth is] passionately concerned to offer his Western readers as thick—and as multilayered—a slice of Indian life in the 1950s as this huge novel can hold ... Lavishly detailed ... lovingly recounted." —New York Times Book Review
"A huge, fulsome novel ... [with] surprising depths ... What makes the book special is the wit and whimsy that inform its pages." —Chicago Tribune
"A Suitable Boy provides that rarest of books, a literary tour de force as pleasant as it is unpretentious ... a book as suitable for the scholar's nightstand as it is for any restful and enriching summer vacation." —USA Today
"A magnificent display of artistic control... . A Suitable Boy is a page-turner…that pays the reader back and richly." —Los Angeles Times
This information about A Suitable Boy was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Vikram Seth has written acclaimed books in several genres: verse novel, The Golden Gate; travel book, From Heaven Lake; animal fables, Beastly Tales; epic fiction, A Suitable Boy. His most recent novel, An Equal Music, was published in 1999. He lives in England and India.
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