Authors who have made us wait for their books

Between Arundhati Roy's Booker prize-winning The God of Small Things and her forthcoming The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is an interval of 20 long years.
(Picture Credit: Arundhati Roy/ Facebook)

Author Akhil Sharma took a gap of 14 years between his book An Obedient Father (2000) and Family Life (2014). Sharma wrote Family Life, an autobiographical story of a family's emigration from India to the US, over 12 years. "I feel as if I've shattered my youth on this book. I still find it hard to believe that it's over," he told the Guardian ahead of the book release in 2014.
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Author Harper Lee's books To Kill a Mocking Bird (1960) and Go Set A Watchman (2015) were published at an interval of 55 years. Go Set A Watchman was written before To Kill a Mockingbird but Lee lost the manuscript. A friend found it in 2014, and the novel was published a year later.
(Picture Credit: Wikipedia)

Author John Updike took a gap of 24 years between his books The Witches of Eastwick (1984) and The Widows of Eastwick. Updike revisited the wicthes more than two decades later to rap their story up before he died less than a year later in 2009. He explained why he wrote the sequel: "Taking those women into old age would be a way of writing about old age, my old age."
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Author Joseph Heller took a gap of 33 years between his books Catch-22 (1961) and Closing Time (1994). Heller thought of Closing Time as "summing up". And it did end up being his last novel though it was unfavourably compared to his masterpiece.
(Picture Credit: Wikipedia)

Author Vikram Seth wrote A Suitable Boy in 1993 while its sequel A Suitable Girl is still awaited. Seth has spoken of how the collapse of his relationship with French violinist Philippe Honore contributed to "periods of darkness" that led to his writer's block.