A Suitable Boy

‘Set in post-independence
India, the novel follows for eighteen months or so four linked families in
Calcutta, the province of Purva Pradesh and its capital Brahmpur, and the
cities—Delhi, Kanpur, Lucknow—trawled by the heroine’s mother in her search
for a “suitable boy”… But the greatness of the novel, its unassailable
truthfulness, owes less to research than to imagination, an instinctive
knowledge of the human heart—with all its varieties of kindness and cruelty,
its capacity for hurt… As with all the best books, one feels only dismay when
the pages on the right of the tome start thinning out.’— The Observer