The Golden Gate

Vikram Seth · b. 1952 · India

Why it matters

Young professionals fall in and out of love in 1980s San Francisco, their entire story told in nearly six hundred Pushkin-style sonnet stanzas. Seth's audacious debut: a verse novel that shouldn't work and somehow, effortlessly, does.

At a glance

A strict, rhymed sonnet-stanza form runs throughout, unlike anything else in the genre.