Letter: No soap please, we're novelists

IT IS DISAPPOINTING to find your reviewer, Candia McWilliam (Books, 21 March) repeating what she acknowledges to be mere gossip about my alleged sneer at Vikram Seth ('I hear you've written a soap opera'). For the record, I didn't say it. I am at present a few hundred pages into A Suitable Boy and like many of its reviewers, including McWilliam, find it an attractive and likeable fiction. I admire the ambition of the project and the easy grace with which it is achieved.

It is true that while Vikram and I have both tried to express in books the superabundance of India, we set about our tasks rather differently. That is no reason for people to attempt - unsuccessfully, I hope - to create difficulties between us.

Salman Rushdie