Vikram Seth Books Ranked: 9 Books, 9 Completely Different Forms

Lata Mehra is at her sister's wedding when her mother announces that Lata is next, to a boy of the family's choosing. That is the whole engine. Around it Seth builds India in the early 1950s: the first general election, land reform that ruins one family while making another, a shoe business, courtesans and their poetry, Hindu and Muslim households whose sons are friends and whose fathers are not. It moves like a serial, in short chapters that keep ending on a small hook. You start reading about a marriage proposal and finish knowing how a country argued its way into being itself.

A successful Silicon Valley engineer is quietly miserable, so an ex-girlfriend places a lonely-hearts ad on his behalf. Out of that comes a circle of friends in early 1980s San Francisco: a lawyer, a sculptor, an activist who believes the nuclear arms race matters rather more than dinner parties, and a cat with firm views. Every line of the book is verse, in the fourteen-line stanza Pushkin used for Eugene Onegin, and Seth keeps the rhymes running through arguments, breakups, a protest and a funeral without ever sounding like a man showing off his homework.

The narrator plays second violin in a string quartet and lives a small, careful, permanently underfunded London life. Years earlier in Vienna he left a pianist he loved without explaining why, and he has never got over it. Then he sees her again by accident, in a city of nine million people. The love story hurts, but the reason to read the book is the music: four musicians fighting about a tempo, the feel of a borrowed instrument that is worth more than the person holding it, what actually goes through a player's head mid-performance.

Seth was a graduate student doing research in China in the early 1980s when he decided to get home to Delhi overland instead of flying. What follows is permits and refusals, lorry drivers, border officials who could send him back and mostly do not, altitude sickness, and long nights in truck cabins with strangers who share their food. It is his first book, and there is no performance in it at all, just a young man with a very good ear writing down what people said to him and what the road looked like at four in the morning.

As a teenager Seth lived in London with his great-uncle Shanti, a dentist who lost an arm at Monte Cassino, and Shanti's wife Henny, who was German and Jewish and got out of Berlin while her mother and sister did not. Decades later Seth found Henny's letters in the attic and wrote this out of them: two fairly ordinary lives with the twentieth century running straight through the middle. The war material and the correspondence are extraordinary. The connective chapters, where Seth steps forward to explain and reflect, are where the book slows to a walk.

The crocodile and the monkey, the hare and the tortoise, the frog and the nightingale. Seth takes fables from four countries, adds two of his own, and puts all ten into rhyming couplets that a nine-year-old can follow and an adult can enjoy for entirely different reasons. Several of them end badly for the innocent party, which is the honest half of fables that school readers tend to sand down. If you went to an Indian school there is a decent chance one of these was on your syllabus and nobody told you whose it was.

This is the Seth collection people keep by the bed. The poems are brief and unornamented, mostly about distance and the people you are not with, which is why the title poem gets copied into so many midnight messages by people who have no idea who wrote it. Then the book turns: a sequence written in other voices, speaking from inside Hiroshima and the camps, set down flat and quiet and far harder to shake off. Two very different books share this spine, and the join between them is deliberate.

Seth spent several years working with the English composer Alec Roth, writing texts for Roth to set to music, and this book collects four of them along with his account of how the collaboration ran and some of his own calligraphy. The pieces draw on Chinese and Sanskrit sources and on the turning of the seasons, and they are written thin and open on purpose, because a composer needs room to put the music in. Read cold on the page they can feel underdressed. Sung, the same lines fill out completely.

This came out from a small Calcutta press while Seth was in his twenties, long before any of the famous books, and it stayed out of print for years until Penguin brought it back. The poems are a mixed bag: careful formal exercises, a few translations, and a handful of moments where the voice you know from later is already audible under the technique. It is the least essential book on this list and the most interesting one if you care about how a writer gets built, because you can watch him try forms on and put them down again.