A Suitable Boy

A Suitable Boy is Vikram Seth's great classic of Indian literature.

Acclaimed as one of the greatest novels of the last century, Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy remains, twenty years after publication, one of the most entrancing and spellbinding works of fiction yet written. A love story as well as the tale of a country awakening from long years of colonial rule, it tells of Lata, and of her mother's exacting attempts to find her the perfect husband. It also recounts India's troubles shaping its own destiny as the country marches towards its first great General Election.

Vikram Seth's historical novel A Suitable Boy is a story that readers the world over can neither put down nor ever forget.

'Fiction on a grand scale. By the time you reach the last page you will have absorbed a splendid story, full of the tangle and perfume of India' Sunday Telegraph

'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

'This novel, so vast and so amiably peopled, is a long, sweet, sleepless pilgrimage to life' Guardian

'A phenomenon, a prodigy, a marvel of nineteenth-century style storytelling' Evening Standard

'Seth is the best writer of his generation' The Times

Equally gifted as a poet, essayist, memoirist, travel writer and novelist, Vikram Seth is perhaps best known for A Suitable Boy, one of the best loved and most widely read novels of recent times. His other books include An Equal Music, The Golden Gate, Two Lives and The Rivered Earth, a book of libretti to accompany music by the composer Alec Roth.