Vikram Seth asked to return $1.7m 'Suitable Girl' advance

VIKRAM SETH, the acclaimed Indian author of A Suitable Boy, once said it was his job to get money out of publishers and a publisher's job to get a book out of him.

Seth was as good as his word when he successfully extracted a $1.7 million advance from his publisher, Hamish Hamilton, for A Suitable Girl, the sequel to his epic 1993 hit. But the author failed to deliver a manuscript before his June deadline and Hamish Hamilton has demanded its money back.

The fate of A Suitable Girl, which was scheduled to be published later this year, now seems to be hanging in the balance. Seth's agent, David Godwin, is said to be in "furious negotiations" with Hamish Hamilton, an imprint which is part of the merged Random House and Penguin.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"It would be unfair to say the deal has been called off," Godwin told the Times of India. "Vikram has been known to take his time with his books. Our aim is to settle this new date with Hamish Hamilton. If we can't, then Vikram will decide what he wants to do next."

The paper points out that writing a sequel to the epic 1,300-page A Suitable Boy was never going to be a straightforward matter. Seth, who took eight years to write the first book, does not "share his manuscripts with anyone until he is ready and will not be bullied by publishers".

In 2009, when Seth announced he would write the sequel, he told The Guardian: "I am quite a lazy person as well as obsessive, so who knows when the book will actually get done? I hope it'll get done by the target date."

The Times of India says it's no coincidence that Hamish Hamilton's demand for the return of its advance comes "within a week" of the merger of Penguin and Random House. The new entity is eager to "cut costs and streamline operations", the paper says. Literary authors like Seth are an awkward fit in a new publishing model that relies on commercial books that can be churned out quickly and cheaply.

A spokesman for Penguin Random House dismissed those claims today, telling the Daily Telegraph that the issue was "not at all connected to the merger or erroneous suggestions of cost cutting".

A Suitable Boy tells the story of Lata and her search for a husband in post-independence India. Its sequel is believed to be set in contemporary India and to detail Lata's search for a wife for her grandson. Seth – true to form – has refused to disclose further details.

"All I can say is this: I am not quite sure what the book will be like and what it'll contain," he told Outlook India magazine in 2009. "But please allow it to surprise me as well."