Two Lives

"The heartrending story of a two people, a marriage, and a century from the author of A Suitable Boy. . . . “[A] thoughtful, evocative, moving book.”—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

Two Lives 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. Part biography, part memoir, part meditation on our times, here is a masterful work from one of our greatest living writers.

In this magnificent, tender story, Vikram Seth offers both a history of a violent century as well as an intimate portrait of an unlikely friendship, marriage, and abiding yet complex love: that of his beloved uncle, Shanti Behari Seth, an immigrant from India, and his aunt, Helga Gerda Caro, a German Jew who was forced to flee her homeland by the Nazis. 

With Two Lives, Seth has written "a truly heroic tale which demonstrates just how much can sometimes be achieved against monstrous odds." (Washington Times)