Details

ISBN-10: 0060786523
ISBN-13: 9780060786526
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Publish Date: 10/04/2005
Dimensions: 7.94" L, 5.42" W, 2.45" H

A Suitable Boy

Paperback

Price: $26.99

Overview

“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 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.

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Reviews

"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

"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

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

"Spellbinding . . . Patterned after the massively populated nineteenth-century social novels of Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and George Eliot, A Suitable Boy is as vast and teeming as its subject, India." – San Francisco Chronicle

"[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

"The novel casts a fine spell. . . . As you turn page after quiet page . . . what you're doing gradually passes beyond reading. It becomes an involuntary act, like breathing." – Newsweek

"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

"A vivid tapestry of Indian life in the early 1950s . . . [Seth's] characters are captivating . . . They linger in the mind like old friends." – People

"A huge, fulsome novel . . . [with] surprising depths . . . What makes the book special is the wit and whimsy that inform its pages." – Chicago Tribune

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Details

ISBN-10: 0060786523
ISBN-13: 9780060786526
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Publish Date: 10/04/2005
Dimensions: 7.94" L, 5.42" W, 2.45" H
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