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 A SUITABLE BOY

In mid-century India, Mrs. Rupa Mehra is on a quest. Her youngest daughter Lata remains unmarried, and the widowed Mrs. Mehra has decided to rectify the condition by enlisting friends and relatives to help her find Lata "a suitable boy."

Families form the backbone of the novel, as the story revolves around four deeply intertwined clans, three Hindu and one Muslim. The Kapoors represent the Hindi-speaking elite, gaining ascendancy through politics, while the middle-class, Anglicized Mehras firmly believe in the superiority of convent schools, English literature and proper manners. The Chatterjis, eccentric and rather scandalous members of the Bengali intelligentsia, indulge in rhyming couplets and coddle a manic dog named Cuddles, as the Muslim, landowning Khans face legislation that threatens to dissolve their culture and Urdu language along with all feudal land-holdings.

Through these people, Vikram Seth vividly recreates life in post-colonial India, a subcontinent trying to find its bearings, and to reconcile differing religions and languages in one national identity, as it stands on the brink of its first general election. A Suitable Boy is both social satire and social history, a novel whose scope ranges from the politics of a great man to the maneuvering of a mother, from an epic account of a nation at infancy to the torment of a young girl in love.

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