A Suitable Boy
A Suitable Boy is Vikram Seth's 1993 novel, at roughly 1,350 pages one of the longest single-volume novels ever published in English. Set in northern India between 1950 and 1952, in the years immediately after Partition and on the eve of the country's first general election, the book follows four interlinked Hindu and Brahmo families across the cities of Brahmpur, Calcutta, and Lucknow. At its center is the search by Mrs. Rupa Mehra for a suitable boy for her youngest daughter Lata, a nineteen-year-old college student who falls in love unsuitably with a young Muslim student named Kabir, is courted by a Bengali shoemaker named Haresh, and is pursued by the rakish Anglophile poet Amit. Around that domestic plot Seth weaves a panorama of newly independent India: a parliamentary debate over the abolition of the zamindar landlord system, communal riots in Brahmpur, the early days of the Indian Congress, and the lives of writers, courtesans, jurists, and farm laborers.
Where A Suitable Boy keeps showing up
Two of our editors' lists feature this novel.
What you might want to know about A Suitable Boy
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In the early years after Indian independence, a widow sets out to find a suitable boy for her younger daughter. Across four families and three faiths, lives, politics, and futures braid together.
A Suitable Boy is around 1,500 pages, one of the longest novels in English. The prose is accessible, but the cast is large and the political detail dense. Most readers settle in after the first 100 pages and find it absorbing rather than difficult.
Yes. BBC adapted A Suitable Boy into a six-part series in 2020, directed by Mira Nair. The show condenses the novel significantly and shifts emphasis to the central romance. It was BBC's first major drama with an entirely South Asian cast.
A Suitable Boy was written by Vikram Seth, published in 1994 by BCA.
A Suitable Boy is 55 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, A Suitable Boy takes most readers under an hour to finish.
A Suitable Boy is a standalone novel by Vikram Seth, not part of a series.
A Suitable Boy is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
