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. Vikram Seth''s novel is, at its core, a love story: tale of Lata''s and her mother''s, attempts to find a suitable boy, through love or through exacting maternal appraisal. At the same time, it is a story of India, newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis as a sixth of the world''s population faces its first great General Election and the chances to map its own destiny. Vikram Seth is already the best writer of his generation. Vivid, evocative and beautifully written. A siutable boy casts its net far and wide. The greatness of the novel, its unassailable truthfullness, owes less to research than to
imagination, an instinctive
knowledge of the human heart.