A Suitable Boy

Seth's path to this book is odd even by writers' standards. He studied at Oxford, then went to Stanford to do a doctorate in economics, and travelled through China for his research. His first well-known book was The Golden Gate (1986) — a novel about Silicon Valley yuppies written entirely in sonnets, in the stanza form of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

So the man who then sat down to write a vast realist novel about arranged marriage in 1950s India had already written a verse novel about California. He is not a writer with a lane.

He intended something modest: a mother looking for a suitable husband for her daughter.

It grew. It became four families, hundreds of characters, and a portrait of India in 1951 and 1952 — the first years after independence and Partition, the first general election, land reform, Hindu-Muslim tension, the courts, the universities, the shoe trade. The marriage plot is the thread; the country is the fabric.

It came out at 1,349 pages in hardback, and 1,488 in paperback. Publishers had real, physical problems with a book that size: expensive to print, awkward to bind, and hard to sell at a price anyone would pay.

The received wisdom was wrong. It became an international bestseller, was translated widely, and has stayed in print ever since.

Part of the reason is that for all its size it is not a difficult book. The sentences are plain. Nobody needs a diagram. It is long because there is a lot in it, not because it is complicated — which is a distinction publishers routinely fail to make.

The BBC adapted it in 2020, directed by Mira Nair, with a screenplay by Andrew Davies — six hours of television from a 1,350-page novel, which necessarily meant losing whole strands of it. Reviews were mixed, and much of the criticism concerned exactly that compression.

Seth announced a sequel, A Suitable Girl, set sixty years later, and has been publicly late with it for over a decade — including a widely reported episode in which he missed a delivery date and the advance had to be renegotiated.

He has been candid that he does not write to order and will not pretend otherwise. The book has still not appeared.