Two Lives - Hardcover

Seth, Vikram

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060599669 ISBN 13: 9780060599669

Publisher: Harper, 2005

Synopsis

A heartrending new book -- the story of a marriageand the story of two lives -- from the author of theinternational bestselling novel A Suitable Boy

Shanti Behari Seth was born on the eighth day of the eighth month in the eighth year of the twentieth century; he died two years before its close. He was brought up in India in the apparently vigorous but dying Raj and was sent by his family in the 1930s to Berlin -- though he could not speak a word of German -- to study medicine and dentistry. It was here, before he migrated to Britain, that Shanti's path first crossed that of his future wife.

Helga Gerda Caro, known to everyone as "Henny" was also born in 1908, in Berlin, to a Jewish family -- cultured, patriotic, and intensely German. When the family decided to take Shanti as a lodger, Henny's first reaction was, "Don't take the black man!" But a friendship flowered, and when Henny fled Hitler's Germany for England just one month before war broke out, she was met at Victoria Station by the only person in the country she knew: Shanti.

Vikram Seth has woven together their astonishing story, which recounts the arrival into this childless couple's lives of their great-nephew from India -- the teenage student Vikram Seth. The result is an extraordinary tapestry of India, the Third Reich and the Second World War, Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Israel and Palestine, postwar Germany and 1970s Britain.

Two Lives is both a history of a violent century seen through the eyes of two survivors and an intimate portrait of their friendship, marriage, and abiding yet complex love. Part biography, part memoir, part meditation on our times, this is the true tale of two remarkable lives -- a masterful telling from one of our greatest living writers.

About this title

About the Author

Vikram Seth has written acclaimed books in several genres: verse novel, The Golden Gate; travel book, From Heaven Lake; animal fables, Beastly Tales; epic fiction, A Suitable Boy. His most recent novel, An Equal Music, was published in 1999. He lives in England and India.

From AudioFile

In this remarkable audiobook, Vikram Seth presents the lives of his uncle, a one-armed Hindu dentist working in London, and his aunt, a Jew forced to flee her native Germany prior to WWII. Using a clear, direct writing style, Seth blends biography, memoir, history, and travel. The result is a glimpse of what philosopher Martin Buber described as the "I and Thou"--the ability to simultaneously see people within the world and the world within people. The story is made even more vibrant by this wonderful audiobook production in which the author reads his own words and uses narrators Eve Karpf, Tim Bentick, and Vincent Ebrahim to voice the words of the book's characters. R.W.S. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0060599669
• ISBN 13: 9780060599669
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 512