A Suitable Boy (Perennial Classics) - Softcover

Seth, Vikram

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060786523 ISBN 13: 9780060786526

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2005

Synopsis

Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: Lata and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find -- through love or through exacting maternal appraisal -- a suitable boy for Lata to marry. Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence.

About this title

Review:

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)

Book Description:

The classic Number One bestseller from award-winning author Vikram Seth.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0060786523
• ISBN 13: 9780060786526
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1488