A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

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Summary

The tale of Lata's and her mother's attempts to find a suitable boy, through love or through maternal appraisal. Set in post-independence India and involving the lives of four families, it is also an explanation of a whole continent faced with its first great General Election.

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A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

Making use of every possible contemporary source-diaries, memoirs, advice books,government papers, almanacs, even the register of Patents - Liza Picard presentsan entralling picture of how life in London was really lived in the decade between 1660 and 1670: the houses and streets, gardens and parks, cooking, clothes and jewellery, cosmetics, hairdressing, housework, laundry and shopping,medicine and dentistry, sex, education, hobbies, etiquette, law and crime, religion andpopular beliefs. The London of 300 years ago is brought wonderfully (and sometimes horrifyingly) to life.
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 *
Vikram Seth was born in 1952. He trained as an economist and has lived for several years each in England, California, China and India. He is the author of A Suitable Boy, which was an international number one bestseller, An Equal Music and several other novels. He has also written seven volumes of poetry including Beastly Tales and Summer Requiem.
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9781897580202
ISBN 10 1897580207
Title A Suitable Boy
Author Vikram Seth
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Hardback
Publisher Orion Publishing Co
Year published 1993-03-25
Number of pages 336
Prizes Winner of WH Smith Literary Prize 1994, Winner of The Commonwealth Writers Prize 1994, Winner of WH Smith Annual Literary Award 1994, Short-listed for BBC Big Read Top 100 2003
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.