Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story.
Lata and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find — through love or through exacting maternal appraisal — a suitable boy for Lata to marry.
Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves.
A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence.
'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
