Posted by Rizwan on 2/7/2009, 15:54:18
208.118.161.49
Probably too much to expect it to be as good as the original, but still a welcome development...
20 years on, Vikram Seth to pen a sequel to Suitable Boy
The Times of India
3 Jul 2009, 0209 hrs
Twenty years after Mrs Rupa Mehra set out to look for a suitable boy for her daughter, it’ll be Lata’s turn to find a suitable girl for her grandson. After keeping everybody guessing all these years, it’s finally confirmed that writer Vikram Seth is working on the sequel of his best-selling 1993 novel A Suitable Boy, suitably titled A Suitable Girl, to be published in 2013.
Seth admits that he wasn’t inspired earlier to write the sequel. ‘‘It’s now that I feel interested in Lata as a grandmother living in the present. My publishers had been after me for years to write a sequel but I didn’t feel inspired enough. I am happy the muse has returned,’’ says Seth from his London home where he is presently writing the novel. The story has progressed quite a bit in his head, though not as much on the paper, he adds.
A Suitable Girl will be published by Hamish Hamilton, a Penguin imprint. It has bought world English language rights from Seth’s literary agent David Godwin for a mind-boggling sum which Seth refuses to speak about. A Suitable Boy had created history for the $1.1 million advance it received from Indian, British and American publishers of the book. It further broke records — a first for an Indian writer — when the 1,350 page book sold over a quarter of a million copies in hardback and over a million in paperback.
A Suitable Boy was set in the 1950s India against a newly independent India. It followed the stories of four middle-class families, all interweaved, as Mrs Rupa Mehra set about searching a boy for her 19-year-old sprightly daughter Lata.
Message Thread:
« Back to thread