A Suitable Boy
SynopsisPlot
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.
Story
About this book
A Suitable Boy follows Lata Mehra, a young university student in early 1950s India, and her mother's determined campaign to find her an appropriate husband. Mrs. Rupa Mehra has firm ideas about what makes a good match, but Lata has her own attachments and preferences, and the two do not always agree. The search for a partner becomes a lens through which the novel explores caste, religion, family loyalty, and personal independence in a country only a few years past the end of British rule.
The story moves across four large, interconnected families and through settings that include university towns, rural estates, and political gatherings. India's first general election forms part of the backdrop, and several characters are drawn into its currents as landowners, legislators, or voters confronting new realities. Hindu-Muslim tensions, property reform, and the social weight of tradition all press on the characters' choices.
At roughly 1,500 pages, the novel is one of the longest single-volume works in English. Vikram Seth published it in 1993, and it is set in a fictional but carefully detailed version of northern India, with cities and institutions that echo places in Uttar Pradesh and nearby states.
