[3] There are translations into English by Kale,[4] Layne[1] and Ridding;[5] and an abridgement into Gujarati by Bhalan (edited by Keshavlal Dhruv).
The narration proceeds in a succession of nested frames; a large part of it is a retelling by a parrot of a story which was told to it by a sage.
[4] This work can be plausibly claimed to be one of the first novels in the world; making due allowance for the ambiguities of such a classification.
In fact, two modern Indian languages (Kannada and Marathi) use 'kadambari' as a generic term for a romance or a novel.
The Purvabhaga (first part) ends abruptly inside Paragraph 16, at a point when Kadambari is speaking about her love-sickness to Patralekha, as narrated by the latter to Chandrapeeda.)