Penguin Randomly Mucking With Vikram Seth

Vikram Seth’s agent appears to be publicly litigating his book deal with Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin, an arm of Penguin Random House, a co-owned subsidiary of Bertelsmann and Pearson plc. (That’s just fun to type.) According to the Mumbai Mirror, the hybrid publishing monster asked for their $1.7 million advance back. Seth’s publication date was supposed to take place in 2013, and he has apparently not delivered A Suitable Girl, his poorly named sequel to A Suitable Boy, which came out TWENTY. YEARS. AGO. (How crazy is that.) Why? And how? What a fishy story. It’s impossible to believe that any publisher won’t just sit out the wait for the manuscript, particularly at a company that grosses more money than Antigua and Barbuda.