"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 ) Adult/High School–At 17, the Indian-born author left his homeland to study at Oxford. He lived with his aunt and uncle, a middle-class English couple in every way except one–his Uncle Shanti was Indian and his Aunt Henny was a German Jew. Through interviews with his uncle and a trunk of correspondence from his aunt, he is able to tell their story. Readers learn that Shanti, a dentist, lost an arm, and that Henny lost all of her family during World War II. They learn the details of these losses and about the couples romance. Shantis story is told first and is in some ways very similar to the narrators. Hennys story takes up the majority of the book and consists largely of correspondence from before the war until several years after. Hers is mostly a Holocaust story that tells as much about the culture of the time as the woman herself. Finally, they marry, more out of convenience than love, but they stay contentedly together for more than 30 years. The final chapter, a discussion of their estate, seems somewhat rushed and tacked on after the slowly paced narrative that came before. Photographs are scattered throughout. The book is lengthy, but each fact shared is an important building block in telling the tale of this couple in the context of their era. A richly rewarding story. –Jamie Watson, Harford County Public Library, MD Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Equally at home producing a novel in sonnets or a cornucopian family saga, Seth has few equals as a literary technician. Here he turns to the story of Shanti and Henny, a great-uncle and great-aunt with whom he lived for a time in England. Shanti, an Indian dentist who did some training in Germany, lost an arm while serving in a British Army dental unit during the Second World War. His wife was a German Jew who fled to England in 1939, and whose mother and sister perished in concentration camps. The book is less dazzling than its predecessors, but this seems deliberate, as if Seth had adopted the mantle of dutiful family archivist a little too successfully. Nonetheless, his quiet tone has cumulative power as it leads us back in time from suburban calm to the death chambers of Birkenau. Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker "I want [Shanti and Henny] complexly remembered," Seth writes. "I want to mark them true." Seth meets this goal. Two Lives , a biography and record of pre- and postwar life, is at heart a story about two individuals that fate and urgency—more than romantic love, perhaps—thrust together. Relying on interviews and Henny’s gut-wrenching letters from the 1940s and 1950s, Seth reinterprets Germany’s war years and depicts Shanti’s struggle to establish a dental practice and the couple’s deep friendship. Throughout the book, he casts a sharp, clear eye on historical rumblings, offering a welcome Anglo-Indian perspective on the Holocaust. Seth could have pared down his details, better scrutinized his relatives’ relationship, or been more (or less) "objective" about their lives. But in the end, Shanti and Henny are two you’ll want to meet. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. *Starred Review* Seth is the author of the hugely popular novel A Suitable Boy (1993), and with the same attention to atmospheric detail and nuance of character he brought to that book, he now offers a deeply engaging dual biography of his great-uncle and great-aunt. At age 17, Seth journeyed from his native Calcutta to London to prepare for study at Oxford, and while in the British capital, he became acquainted with his two relatives--his uncle, an Indian like himself and a dentist, and his aunt, a German-born Jew--both of whom lived in London, though they had found their way there through much different paths. After writing A Suitable Boy , Seth decided to approach Two Lives not so much as a personal remembrance as a researched life history of the couple. So, as if one of their stories weren't rich