A Suitable Boy: A Novel [Paperback]

“Surrender to this strange, beguiling world and be swept away on the wings of story. . . . It is difficult to imagine that many contemporary writers could give us a novel that provides so much deep satisfaction.” —Jonathan Yardley,Washington Post Book World

A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux,A Suitable Boytells 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. 

“Surrender to this strange, beguiling world and be swept away on the wings of story. . . . It is difficult to imagine that many contemporary writers could give us a novel that provides so much deep satisfaction.” -Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

“Enormously varied, unfailingly interesting, funny, sad, exasperating and appealing, this novel becomes a real passage to India.” -Atlantic Monthly

“Awe . . . is what Seth’s labor inspires in the reader. In the end it is as if one had listened to a raag played by a musician with skill, dexterity, and charm.” -Anita Desai, New York Review of Books

“[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 detlc