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Vikram Seth had a problem. The Calcutta-born, London-based author had exploded onto the literary scene in 1986 with The Golden Gate, a novel in verse set in California. His 1993 Indian saga A Suitable Boy — at nearly 1,400 pages the longest work of fiction in English since the 18th century — sold a million copies in Britain alone. Then came some poems, an opera libretto and … nothing.

"You don't know exactly what to write about next," Seth's mother, visiting from India, told him in 1994. "Why don't you write about him?" She was referring to another Seth family member who, improbably, has become the co-subject of one of the most remarkable biographies since, well, the 18th century, when James Boswell profiled Samuel Johnson.

Boswell had it easy: Johnson was the leading literary figure of the age. But Seth's Two Lives focuses on people unknown to all but friends and family: Seth's great-uncle Shanti and great-aunt Henny, with whom the author lived in north London for several years as a student. Though these two hardly changed the course of history, the passion and eloquence Seth brings to their story makes Two Lives fascinating — and maybe even worth its reported $2.5 million advance.

Born in a northern Indian village, Shanti Seth went to Berlin in 1931 to study dentistry. There he stayed in the apartment of a Jewish widow whose daughter, Henny Caro, became one of Shanti's closest friends. Shanti moved to Edinburgh to continue his studies in 1937, as anti-Jewish laws were making life difficult for the Caros in Berlin. Henny escaped to London two years later, but her mother and sister died in concentration camps in 1943. Shanti, meanwhile, joined the British army as a dentist and lost his arm at the battle of Monte Cassino. After the war he married Henny and, astonishingly, took up dentistry again.

So what? a reader might ask. "I wasn't sure there would be any interest in this story," Seth confides from the office of his London publisher. "My mother asked me to interview Shanti Uncle because he was sick and lonely. She thought it would cheer him, and I thought it was my duty as a son and great-nephew. But his verve and the story itself convinced me there was something there, the relationship between two remarkable people."

They made a strange couple. Short and energetic, Shanti loved talk and his evening whisky. Henny, tall and elegant, was quieter but irrepressibly kind. They never had children and argued frequently, in German, yet they remained devoted. Henny quit her well-paid office job to focus on Shanti's needs. He underwrote her passion for clothes and took her on yearly vacations to Switzerland (they never returned to Germany).

Fortunately, there is more to Two Lives than two lives. Henny and Shanti neatly spanned the 20th century (they were both born in 1908; she died in 1989, he in 1998) and Two Lives is a pocket history of those tumultuous times — from the Indian freedom campaign through World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The book is also about Seth: he recounts his student days in England, his 10 years studying economics at Stanford University, his decision to switch careers and write The Golden Gate (after reading Pushkin's poem Eugene Onegin). He is no passive narrator. He reacts with horror to the fate of Henny's family and friends in wartime Germany, as told — sometimes at numbing length — through her letters.

Two Lives is thin on Seth's current life, though in person he is as voluble as Shanti must have been. Unmarried at 53, the author has a house in north London and another in Delhi, three doors from his parents'. His father was a shoe company executive, his mother the first female High Court chief justice in India. Her autobiography was published in 2003. "Yes, she beat me to it," jokes Seth. His next project: "I'll finish the Suitable Quartet — you know, The Unsuitable Boy, The Unsuitable Girl, The Suitable Couple." A joke, right? "I don't know," deadpans the author of very long books, "but it'll be something short. As a reader, I'm very impatient."

As a great-nephew, however, he is very patient. An early draft of Two Lives was tinged with bitterness: Shanti, at the end of his life, committed an act of family betrayal that Seth cannot fully understand, but in the final version forgives. After all, the man was family, and thus familiarly human. "Behind every door," writes Seth toward the end of Two Lives, "on every ordinary street, in every hut in every ordinary village on this middling planet of a trivial star, such riches are to be found." Seth found them in an unexpected place: his own family.

• DONALD MORRISON
• Vikram Seth draws inspiration from his own relatives