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Books Like A Suitable Boy

Best books to read after A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

If Vikram Seth's vast, warm portrait of 1951 India captivated you, these picks span Indian fiction in English, large-canvas novels of post-colonial societies, and the tradition of the great family saga.

  1. 1

    Midnight's Children

    by Salman Rushdie

    The other great novel of Indian independence — Saleem Sinai's magical-realist epic covering the same political moment in a completely different register.

    Buy
  2. 2

    The God of Small Things

    by Arundhati Roy

    Roy's Booker Prize novel of Kerala, caste, and forbidden love — Indian fiction at its most poetic and precise.

    Buy
  3. 3

    The White Tiger

    by Aravind Adiga

    Adiga's Booker-winning dark comedy of modern India — the country A Suitable Boy hoped to become, seen from the bottom.

    Buy
  4. 4

    Train to Pakistan

    by Khushwant Singh

    The Partition that shadowed the 1951 India of A Suitable Boy — what the founding violence looked like from a border village.

    Buy
  5. 5

    A Fine Balance

    by Rohinton Mistry

    Mistry's large-canvas novel of India in 1975 — four lives converging during the Emergency, as warm and as heartbreaking as Seth.

    Buy
  6. 6

    The Remains of the Day

    by Kazuo Ishiguro

    Another slow, beautiful novel of a world passing — Stevens the butler and A Suitable Boy's characters share the elegiac quality of people who don't know they are living in the last of something.

    Buy
  7. 7

    The Golden Gate

    by Vikram Seth

    Seth's earlier novel in 690 sonnets — a very different book that shows the same formal daring at smaller scale.

    Buy
  8. 8

    The Moor's Last Sigh

    by Salman Rushdie

    Rushdie's family saga of four generations of Bombay merchants — the same panoramic scope in a more baroque mode.

    Buy

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