Quote by Vikram Seth: “A family is a strange beast. It loves you and destroys you simultaneously.”

Family is where we are most loved and most vulnerable to being harmed. The same bonds that give us identity and belonging are the ones most capable of wounding us, because the people closest to us know exactly where we are tender. This is not a reason to flee family — it is the truth of intimacy.

A Suitable Boy was published in 1993, fifty years after Indian independence, and used the question of a young woman's marriage as a lens through which to examine the values, tensions, and contradictions of modern Indian society. Family and its demands were central to everything in the novel.

Indian novelist and poet, born in Calcutta in 1952 and educated at Oxford and Stanford. His novel A Suitable Boy, published in 1993, is one of the longest novels written in the English language and an intricate portrait of family, love, and India in the years after independence.