It was here, before he migrated to Britain, that Shanti's path first crossed that of his future wife. Henny Gerda Caro was also born in 1908, in Berlin, to a Jewish family, cultured, patriotic and intensely German.

When the family decided to have Shanti as a lodger, Hennys first reaction was, 'Don't take the black man!' But a friendship flowered, and when Henny fled Hitler's Germany for England, just one month before the war broke out, she was met at Victoria Station by the only person she knew in the country: Shanti. Vikram Seth, their great-nephew from India, arrived in this childless couple's life as a teenage student.

Now he has woven together the astonishing story of Shanti and Henny, and the result 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. Two Lives is both a history of a violent country seen through the eyes of two survivors as well as an intimate portrait of their friendship, marriage and abiding yet complex love.

Part biography, part memoir, part meditation on our times, this is the true tale of two remarkable livesa masterful telling from one of our greatest living writers. Click here to see Vikram Seth's Microsite (less)