Description
Vikram Seth’s captivating book is the story of a century and of a love affair across a racial divide Shanti Behari Seth was born on the eighth day of the eighth month in the eighth year of the twentieth century; he died two years before its close. He was brought up in India in the late years of the Raj, and was sent by his family in the 1930s to Berlin?though he could not speak a word of German?to study medicine and dentistry. It was here, before he migrated to Britain, that Shanti’s path first crossed that of his future wife. Henny Gerda Caro was also born in 1908, in Berlin, to a Jewish family, cultured, patriotic and intensely German. When the family decided to have Shanti as a lodger, Henny?s first reaction was, ‘Don’t take the black man!’ But a friendship flowered, and when Henny fled Hitler’s Germany for England, just one month before the war broke out, she was met at Victoria Station by the only person she knew in the country: Shanti. Vikram Seth, their great-nephew from India, arrived in this childless couple’s life as a teenage student. Now he has woven together the astonishing story of Shanti and Henny, and the result is an extraordinary tapestry of India, the Third Reich and the Second World War, Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Israel and Palestine, postwar Germany and 1970s Britain. Two Lives is both a history of a violent country seen through the eyes of two survivors as well as an intimate portrait of their friendship, marriage and abiding yet complex love. Part biography, part memoir, part meditation on our times, this is the true tale of two remarkable lives?a masterful telling from one of our greatest living writers. About the Author Vikram Seth was born in India and educated here and in England, California and China. He has written acclaimed books in several genres: verse novel, The Golden Gate; travel book, From Heaven Lake; animal fables, Beastly Tales; epic novel, A Suitable Boy. His most recent novel, An Equal Music, was published in 1999. In a move which will cheer hundreds of thousands of his fans, Vikram Seth has announced that he is writing the long-awaited sequel to his much-loved million-copy bestseller A Suitable Boy. A Suitable Girl will be published by Penguin in Autumn 2013. Copy paste this link on your browser address bar to know more: http://www.penguinbooksindia.com/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=32
