Seth, Vikram A Suitable Boy ISBN 13: 9781857990881

A Suitable Boy - Softcover

9781857990881: A Suitable Boy
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Vikram Seth's novel is at its core a love story, a tale of Lata - and her mother's attempts to find a suitable boy, through love or through exacting maternal appraisal. Set in post-Independence India and involving the lives of four large families and those who orbit them, it is also a vast panoramic exploration of a whole continent at a crucial hour as a sixth of the world's population faces its first great General Election and the chance to map its own destiny.

'A Suitable Boy may prove to be the most fecund as well as the most prodigious work of the latter half of this century - perhaps even the book to restore the serious reading public's faith in the contemporary novel ... You should make time for it. It will keep you company for the rest of your life' Daniel Johnson, The Times

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About the Author:
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 five volumes of poetry including Beastly Tales. Reader biographies: Andrew Sachs (Manuel in Fawlty Towers) has performed widely in stage, film and television. He won Best Actor in the Sony Radio Awards 1989 and was Performer of the Year, Spoken Word Awards 1999. Fiona Shaw has starred on stage in Medea and The Prime of Miss Jean Brody among many others. Television roles range from Persuasion to Gormenghast. Feature films include My Left Foot, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
From Kirkus Reviews:
Set in newly independent India, Nehru's early 1950's, this adipose saga counterbalances a book of social manners--the marrying off of a well-to-do educated young woman, Lata Mehra--with a historical account (even at the level of transcribed parliamentary debate) of the subcontinent trying to find its societal bearings vis-...-vis language, religion, and the redistribution of estate-lands taken off the hands of the elite. Set mainly in Brahmpur, the story encompasses four well-off families, with a focus mostly on the younger members--poets, academics, playboys, newlyweds--who stitch a pattern of peccadillo through their elders' expectations. Meanwhile, Seth, whose California novel in verse, The Golden Gate (1986), was clever and energetic in concept but dull and soapy in final effect, falls into the same trap here: lots of stuff obviously--at a marathon 1300-plus pages--but characters made out of clich‚, with background-India the very stuffed pillow of local color that keeps them standing. The book, too, fairly squeaks with its own pleasure in itself, larded with poetry and a general recommendation of art over politics and money: the characters it spends the most time over are narcissists. Anyone wanting to read how a marriageable daughter can X-ray a whole society ought to let this cream-puff-wrapped-in-a-cinder-block pass and return to Tanizaki's classic Japanese masterpiece, The Makioka Sisters. Fat (the publishing world's delayed reparation for Rushdie's Satanic Verses?) but fatuous. (First printing of 100,000; Book-of- the-Month Dual Selection for May) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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  • PublisherOrion Pub Co
  • Publication date1994
  • ISBN 10 1857990889
  • ISBN 13 9781857990881
  • BindingPaperback
  • Edition number3
  • Number of pages1504
  • Rating

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