Vikram Seth has produced a remarkably diverse body of work over the past two decades. An Equal Music was preceded by four collections of poems and one volume of translations of Chinese poetry; a travel book (From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet, 1983); a children's book (Arion and the Dolphin, 1995); a novel in verse, set in contemporary San Francisco (The Golden Gate, 1986); and a novel set in northern India during the 1950s (A Suitable Boy, 1993)—a sprawling story of an arranged marriage among middle-class Indians that drew comparisons with the works of John Galsworthy and Jane Austen (and which has the distinction of being, at some 1,400 pages in length, the largest single-volume work published in English in nearly two and a half centuries).