A Suitable Boy: The classic bestseller

A Suitable Boy: The classic bestseller

by VikramSeth (Author)

Synopsis

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.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 336
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: W&N
Published: 25 Mar 1993

ISBN 10: 1897580207
ISBN 13: 9781897580202
Book Overview: * Describes one of the most exciting and memorable decades (the Great Fire and Plague) in Londons history * Will appeal to all those interested in non-academic social history, e.g. Lark Rise to Candleford, Rowland Parks The Common Stream, visiters to national Trust kitchens and stables, etc
Prizes: Winner of WH Smith Literary Prize 1994 and The Commonwealth Writers Prize 1994 and WH Smith Annual Literary Award 1994. Shortlisted for BBC Big Read Top 100 2003.

Media Reviews
The best writer of his generation * The Times *
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 * Guardian *
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 * Observer *
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 * The TImes *
A quietly monumental novel . . . [Seth] has given that unlikeliest of hybrids, a modest tour de force * TLS *
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 * Hindustan Times *
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 * Sunday Times *
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 * Evening Standard *
Author Bio
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.