Heat and dust - these simple, terrible words describe the Indian summer. Year after year, endlessly, it is the same. And everyone who experiences this heat and dust is changed for ever. We often say, in these modern times, that sexual relationships have changed, for better or for worse. But in this [...]
The beautiful, spoiled and bored Olivia, married to a civil servant, outrages society in the tiny, suffocating town of Satipur by eloping with an Indian prince. Fifty years later, her step-granddaughter goes back to the heat, the dust and the squalor of the bazaars to solve the enigma of Olivia's sc[...]
This brilliant collection spans two worlds - the restless, aspiring society of New York's Upper East Side and the world of India's capital city, New Delhi, where the old India symbolized by Gandhi's spinning wheel is giving way to one powered by industry and property development. A rich cast of cha[...]
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 unfo[...]
This witty and perceptive novel is about Prem, a young teacher in New Delhi who has just become a householder and is finding his responsibilities perplexing.[...]
Two English women go out to India. One is Olivia in the 1920s. The other is her step-granddaughter who retraces Olivia's steps, trying to unravel the mysteries of her 'scandalous' life and becoming involved in a passionate drama of her own.[...]
A profound and powerful novel, winner of the Booker Prize
Set in colonial India during the 1920s, Heat and Dust tells the story of Olivia, a beautiful woman suffocated by the propriety and social constraints of her position as the wife of an important English civil servant. Longing for passion an[...]
For her first novel in more than nine years, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has written a most unusual book in a career of distinctive and unique accomplishments. My Nine Lives is "Chapters of a Possible Past," as the subtitle declares. It is, as the author has commented, a book filled with "invented memories[...]