This weekend was the summer solstice, and it's been sun-drenched, and bakingly hot. Our house isn't designed for such temperatures (our bedroom was 27 degrees last night when I was trying to sleep), but I've been coping the best I can. I bought a bunch of sunflowers, and another bunch of wildflowers, and filled the living room with colour. I've got two separate jugs of infused tap water chilling in the fridge (replacing the water every time I drink a glass): one with strawberry tops and mint from the garden, the other with cucumber and mint. The garden itself is a jungle of fresh herbs — bolting dill, giant flatleaf parsley, chaotic mint — with cucumber and tomato and radishes pushing their way up in between.

My two hours of classes in the gym were a challenge yesterday, after two weeks away, but the pool this morning was a dream, and a relief to plunge into the cold water for twenty-five minutes. I'm subsisting on infused water, iced coffee, and fresh strawberries.

Matthias went into London yesterday to watch the cricket with a friend of ours, and stayed overnight, but he's back now, and we're both vegetating in the house (him next to a whirring fan) and doing our best to keep cool. I'm really not looking forward to commuting back and forth to work next week, but at least my actual office is air-conditioned.

I haven't read much of note recently, apart from Vikram Seth's incredible family/historical saga (1500 pages long!), A Suitable Boy, which I picked up on the train out to Amsterdam and just finished this afternoon. Although I'd obviously heard of it, my mum was the one who inspired me to actually read it, having been put on to it herself by one of her closest friends (who incidentally was my editor during the ten years I worked as a professional newspaper book-reviewer, because Canberra is Like That, and the Australian media landscape is also Like That), who had read it and raved about it. Now my sister is also listening to the audiobook, and loving that as well.

The frame of this brick of a book is the eventual marriage (and choice of husband) of Lata, a young woman in newly independent India — the novel opens at her older sister's wedding with their mother, one daughter successfully married off, immediately turning her matchmaking attention to the next one — but it's also about their extended family and social circle as a whole, and about the newly independent Indian state. Chapters deal in turn with religions and religious practice, class and caste and economic relations, infrastructure, academia, post-partition tensions with the newly independent state of Pakistan, land rights, and more, and Seth deals equally deftly with fractious family meals, parliamentary debates, pompous faculty board meetings, and emotionally wrenching sectarian violence, and treats all with equal weight and sensitivity. It shows — through zooming in on this one fictional family and then zooming out at various points — newly independent India, and its citizens grappling with what they want their independent nation to look like. It resembles Jane Austen at times, and at others Dickens, and in other moments seems positively Shakespearean, but it's really its own unbelievably accomplished thing, all the more impressive due to Seth's ability to sustain everything for 1500 pages. At times, it skewers its own pretensions with self-aware self-deprecation, and there's a particular scene involving a poetry reading and audience Q&A that had me howling with laughter and which felt obviously inspired by many real-world literary events experienced by the author. The last 10 per cent was an absolutely wild ride, at turns melodramatic and tragic, culminating — as promised from the opening pages and in the traditions of all its various literary inspirations — with a massive wedding. Honestly, I'm in awe.