The Golden Gate
Vikram Seth
(Faber £4.99, pp308)
Buy it at a discount at BOL

When Vikram Seth first published this enchanting novel-in-verse in 1986, he was known as the author of From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet.

The acclaim Seth received for this exuberant and witty tale of twentysomethings looking for love, pleasure and the meaning of life in the sunshine state of California established him overnight as one of the really important new English literary voices of the 1980s.

Seth is now better known for his epic novel of India, A Suitable Boy (and also An Equal Music), but for those who have been daunted by the monumental challenge of the later work, this delightful one-off is the perfect hors-d'oeuvre to the feast.

The on-off love story of John and Claire is a narrative poem with a dazzling surface that conceals a serious grappling with the complexity of relationships and the pursuit of happiness. Although The Golden Gate now seems peculiarly of its time, it lives on as an unusually successful marriage of poetry with fiction and as a high-spirited assertion of the timeless values of storytelling and character.