A Suitable Boy

Twentieth anniversary-edition of Seth's masterly hymn to life and love set against the backdrop of an independent India. * THE OBSERVER * A phenomenon, a prodigy, a marvel of 19th century storytelling in the language of today . . . It is hard to believe that Seth is only one man. He writes with the omniscience and authority of a large, orderly committee of experts on Indian politics, law, medicine, crowd psychology, urban and rural social customs, dress, cuisine, horticulture, funerary rites, cricket and even the technicalities of shoe manufacture * Evening Standard * Conceived on a grand scale of the great 19th century novels - War and Peace, Middlemarch - A Suitable Boy grows to match them in breadth and depth . . . [A] massive and magnificent book * Sunday Times * An immensely enjoyable novel which describes with unhurried pace the panorama of India . . . Everything appears familiar to us, yet in fact it is newly minted by a master artist * Hindustan Times * A quietly monumental novel . . . [Seth] has given that unlikeliest of hybrids, a modest tour de force * TLS * Not merely one of the longest novels in English; it may also prove to be the most fecund as well as the most prodigious work of the latter half of [the twentieth] century * The TImes * No one, surely, could wish this novel shorter . . . the greatness of the novel, its unassailable truthfulness, owes less to research than to imagination, an instinctive knowledge of the human heart * Observer * This novel, so vast and so amiably peopled, is a long, sweet, sleepless pilgrimage to life . . . His novel deserves thousands of long marriages and suitable readers * Guardian * The best writer of his generation * The Times *