The Suitable Groom. Book 1

Modern classic Vikram Seth is a true citizen of the world. Born in India, educated at Oxford, and also at Stanford University in California, where instead of a dissertation in economics he wrote his first novel «The Golden Gate» about... American yuppies — and it was a novel in verse; moreover, written from beginning to end in the Onegin stanza. And after many years of work came out «The Suitable Groom» — «an epic, multifaceted like the novels of Dickens or Trollope, and vast as India itself» (San Francisco Chronicle), record-breaking in many respects: the longest novel in the history of English literature published in a single volume; translations into three dozen languages, and a worldwide circulation reaching 26 million copies. The action takes place in the fictional city of Brahmpur on the banks of the Ganges shortly after India gained independence; Mrs. Rupa Mehra, having married off her eldest daughter Savita, is trying to find a suitable groom for her youngest daughter, college student Lata, — and she, as a modern girl, has her own opinion on the matter and tends to listen not to her elders but to her own heart... In 2020, BBC One released a miniseries based on the novel, known in Russian as «A Suitable Boy»; directed by Mira Nair («Vanity Fair», «New York, I Love You»), and the script was written by the renowned Andrew Davies («Les Misérables», «War and Peace», «Brideshead Revisited», «Northanger Abbey», «Sense and Sensibility»).