A Suitable Boy: The classic bestseller

Making use of every possible contemporary source-diaries, memoirs, advice books,government papers, almanacs, even the register of Patents - Liza Picard presentsan entralling picture of how life in London was really lived in the decade between 1660 and 1670: the houses and streets, gardens and parks, cooking, clothes and jewellery, cosmetics, hairdressing, housework, laundry and shopping,medicine and dentistry, sex, education, hobbies, etiquette, law and crime, religion andpopular beliefs. The London of 300 years ago is brought wonderfully (and sometimes horrifyingly) to life.

About the Author :
Vikram Seth was born in 1952. He trained as an economist and has lived for several years each in England, California, China and India. He is the author of A Suitable Boy, which was an international number one bestseller, An Equal Music and several other novels. He has also written seven volumes of poetry including Beastly Tales and Summer Requiem.

Review :
The best writer of his generation 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 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 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 A quietly monumental novel . . . [Seth] has given that unlikeliest of hybrids, a modest tour de force 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 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 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