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Heat and Dust

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Winner of the Booker Prize as best novel of the year in 1983, Heat and Dust was also made into a major motion picture starring Julie Christie, now regarded by many as a classic.
Out of India: Selected Stories

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of 1986, this volume of stories, selected by the author from her own early work, represents the essence of her Indian experience. Bearing Jhabvala's hallmark of balance, subtlety, wry humor, and beauty, these stories present characters that prove to be as vulnerable to the contradictions and oppressions of the human heart as to those of India itself.
An experience of India

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Travelers

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

In Travelers, Jhabvala examines the unlikely convergence of four wanderers: Asha, an imperious Indian widow, Raymond, a curious Englishman, Lee, an American looking for her spiritual core, and Gopi, an impressionable young student. With a mixture of impassioned dialogue and subtle narrative, Jhabvala examines the psychological and cultural forces that wend their paths into inextricable knots of love and conflict.
My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

In this, her first novel in more than nine years, in a career studded with distinctive and unique accomplishments, award-winning Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has written her most unusual book. My Nine Lives, "Chapters of a Possible Past," as the subtitle declares, is comprised of nine vignettes that lead from London to Delhi, from Hollywood to New York—all linked to portray a rich life, filled with spiritual searching.

After seventeen books, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala takes herself on as a subject, exploring the lives she may have or may have wished to live. My Nine Lives is a moving and intriguing book of truth, invention, history, and memory.
Three Continents

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Three Continents is a tale of the clash between the easternized West and the westernized East. Twins Harriet and Michael-spoiled, quixotic, and extremely wealthy-have eschewed the vapid world of cocktail parties and adulteries that seems to be their inheritance. In constantly searching to complete themselves, they become the perfect fodder for the charismatic Rawul of Dhoka and his sinister Sixth World Movement.
The Householder: A Novel

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

According to the ancient writings there are three stages in a man's life: first he is a child; then a student; and then a householder, when a man must raise a family and see to their needs. This novel is about Prem, a young teacher in New Delhi who has just become a householder and is finding the responsibilities perplexing.
Shards of Memory

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

A young man named Henry sits down with his grandmother, a genial lady still called Baby by everyone, in her Manhattan townhouse where he has lived all his life, to record the history of a spiritual movement that has woven itself into the fabric of their family's lives for four generations. What unfolds is a mesmerizing family saga: the imperious great-grandmother Elsa and her husband, an Indian poet, whose marriage is as unconventional as the movement they help to found; Baby, their cheerfully pragmatic daughter, married to the aloof English diplomat Graeme; bemused and brooding Renata, Baby and Graeme's daughter, married to an idle dreamer; and finally Henry, Renata's son, who in many ways bears the legacy of all that has gone before. Their lives--and that of the movement's elusive yet ineluctable founder, known only as the Master--intertwine, diverge, and collide with each other in a masterfully orchestrated story spanning the twentieth century and several continents.

By turns brilliantly satiric, insightful, and profoundly moving, Shards Of Memory is a beautifully wrought tale of love and devotion, of family and faith, and of the complex nature of memory itself--a literary tour de force from one of the most distinguished novelists of our time.
Poet and Dancer

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Jhabvala, winner of the Booker Prize as well as an Academy Award for screenwriting, has written a haunting tale of the complex and perilous relations between two young cousins, Angel and Lara. A masterful novel which explores the dangers of love and committment.
East Into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Nature of Passion

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Like Birds, Like Fishes (Panther Books)

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Amrita: Or to Whom She Will

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
A Backward Place

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Six colourful, comic characters inhabit A Backward Place. All but one are Westerners who have come to Delhi to experience an alternative way of life. But, far from being hippies, their ability to adapt to this exotic culture often leaves something to be desired. Etta, an aristocratic, faded beauty maintains her Parisian chic while Clarissa talks enthusiastically about the simple life but stops short of ever roughing it herself. On the other hand Bal, the one Indian protagonist, holds quite Western aspirations to Hollywood glamour. A Backward Place humorously explores contradictions in attitudes and lifestyles and the interplay between culture and individuality. But it is also a Dickensian drama, charting the highs and lows of everyday life against the enchanting backdrop of a bustling Indian city.
Esmond in India

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Shakuntala is a young Indian woman who returns to post-Independence Delhi from Oxford University. Sketching a gallery of fascinating and distinctive characters against a rich background, she draws the contrast between two very different families and their daily lives -- their squabbles, their politics, their love affairs, their expectations. She brings to life the nostalgic Englishman Esmond Stillwood, also the beautiful Gulab and her son Ravi, the elderly Uma, and Shakuntala's family and the neighbours Ram Nath and Lakshmi. A master of both the comic and the serious, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has constructed a richly ripe Indian comedy of manners. She strips bare that certain section of affluent Indian society which is particularly vulnerable to the seductions of an imperial presence, and brilliantly and wittily crystallizes some of the confusions that bedevilled India at the dawn of Independence.
Get Ready for Battle

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
In Search of Love and Beauty

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

This observant and insightful novel reveals, in rich and poignant detail, the interior lives of three generations of people in their quest for love and beauty Louise, not content with her husband's gentle affection, strives to reclaim her youth in titillating social and spiritual adventures. Her daughter Marietta searches for beauty in lofty ideas and in her obsession for her son Mark, who believes love is to be found in the pursuit of money and young, vacuous lovers. And Leo, their eccentric, self-styled guru, satisfies himself with power-commanding the bodies and souls of his followers.
Demonstrating Jhabvala's deft twists of irony and humor, In Search of Love and Beauty brings several lifespans, full of hopes and ideals, within our grasp.
A New Dominion

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
A Stronger Climate

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
How I Became a Holy Mother

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Set, of course in India, these stories are concerned not so much with Europeans in India as with Indians themselves. They are about universal human passions—yet interwoven with India itself. The heat, the vastness, the loneliness of India are all reflected in the lives of the people living in a country that is not so much an additional character as, often, the most central one. As always she tells her tales with compassion, penetration, humor, and the blithe gift of narration familiar to the hundreds of thousands who have seen the she scripted for the legendary Merchant Ivory team—such as Howards End, The Remains of the Day, A Room with a View, and her own Heat and Dust—and who have delighted in her novels.