‘Set in post-independence\n India, the novel follows for eighteen months or so four linked families in\n Calcutta, the province of Purva Pradesh and its capital Brahmpur, and the\n cities—Delhi, Kanpur, Lucknow—trawled by the heroine’s mother in her search\n for a “suitable boy”… But the greatness of the novel, its unassailable\n truthfulness, owes less to research than to imagination, an instinctive\n knowledge of the human heart—with all its varieties of kindness and cruelty,\n its capacity for hurt… As with all the best books, one feels only dismay when\n the pages on the right of the tome start thinning out.’— The Observer