Two cheering pieces of books news to round off the week. Fans of Vikram Seth will be delighted to hear that the sequel to A Suitable Boy – his family saga set in 1950s India – will be published after all.

Seth was called to account by Penguin after he failed to deliver the manuscript for A Suitable Girl in time for the 20th anniversary of his 1993 bestseller this autumn, thus defaulting on a $1.7m (£1.1m) advance.

As part of the publication package, Penguin bought the paperback rights from A Suitable Boy's original publisher Orion – and it is Orion that has stepped back into the frame to save the agonised author.

A Suitable Girl will now be published in the autumn of 2016, giving Seth plenty of time to match the epic scale of A Suitable Boy – one of the longest books ever published in English, at 1,349 pages – should he so choose.

Seth has played the field with his previous books, publishing his 1986 debut The Golden Gate with Faber, his 1999 novel An Equal Music with Weidenfeld and Nicholson, and his 2005 memoir Two Lives with Little, Brown. But he comes over all sentimental when considering his return to the publisher that took the biggest risk for him.

"Twenty years ago, Orion, who were then quite a new publisher, took a risk and brought out A Suitable Boy," he said. "It is entirely in the fitness of things that A Suitable Girl will be joining her companion. And for my part, it is a great pleasure to be home again".

Meanwhile, an entirely different model of a publishing career is demonstrated by Sarah Waters, whose longstanding publisher Virago has just announced details of her next novel, which will be published next autumn.

The name of the novel is yet to be announced, but her website reveals that she is moving back in time to the early 1920s, after the 1940s settings of her previous two novels The Night Watch and The Little Stranger:

It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband and even servants, life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. For with the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the 'clerk class', the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. And as passions mount and frustration gathers, no one can foresee just how far, and how devastatingly, the disturbances will reach …

Passions will be mounting among the legions of Waters fans at this deliciously disturbing news.