Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

In a narrative intermingling past and present, a young English woman journeys to India to reconstruct the behavior of her grandfather's first wife, Olivia, who left husband and friends in 1923 out of love for an Indian prince. Reprint.

Heat and Dust

Over the course of her glittering literary career, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala wrote some of the most wonderful novels of the twentieth century and screenplays to some of the most beloved films - but she was also a master of the short story form. This stunning new collection brings together the jewels in the crown of her writing: it is a showcase of astonishing storytelling power.

The stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

At the End of the Century

This collection of stories spans two worlds: the aspiring society of New York's Upper East Side and the world of India's capital, New Delhi. The rich cast of characters include Indian businessmen and holy women, New Yorkers preoccupied with money, students, hostesses and ambitious politicians.

Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi

East Into Upper East

A Backward Place

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.

Travelers

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.

In a narrative intermingling past and present, a young English woman journeys to India to reconstruct the behavior of her grandfather's first wife, Olivia, who left husband and friends in 1923 out of love for an Indian prince

Angel is dark and plain, introverted and submissive, a spontaneous composer of childish verses, wholly consumed by the wild, seductive spell of her cousin Lara - a beautiful, irresponsible creature who expresses herself in free-form dance. What begins as a tender and intimate attachment between two young girls deepens in adulthood into something complex and perilous, as Lara's life spins in increasingly erratic circles while Angel's passionate devotion to her remains undiminished. It is a feverish and impenetrable relationship, of reckless master and willing slave, one forged to shield both Angel and Lara from the harshness of their surroundings, as well as from the far greater terrors of the self. It is a relationship that will end in terror for the young women, and for their families. Set against the vivid, dream-like landscape of of Manhattan in the recent past, Poet and Dancer is an altogether unforgettable novel, written with the subtlety, wry humour and beauty that are the hallmarks of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant novelists and storytellers.

Poet and Dancer

Prem, a newly married, young teacher in New Delhi, finds the responsibilities of being a householder perplexing, daily life with his absurd wife bewildering, and confrontations with his headmaster unnerving.

The Householder

Was vom Tage übrig blieb

Kazuo Ishiguro

James Fox

Emma Thompson

Anthony Hopkins

James Ivory

From the Booker Prize–winning novelist and screenwriter of Howard’s End: “Cinematic” and “exquisite” stories of longing, loss, and redemption (Publishers Weekly). In this expansive story collection, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, author of Heat and Dust and the screenplays for The Remains of the Day and A Room with a View, continues her lifelong meditation on East and West. Set in India, England, and New York City, A Lovesong for India reveals what unites us across oceans, cultures, and lifetimes. In “Innocence,” an older couple, whose social standing is marred by a decades–old scandal, rent out rooms in their Delhi home for both companionship and income. The couple becomes deeply invested in the lives of their two tenants, but with the addition of a third renter—a beautiful and provocative woman from India—tensions in the household push the story to its feverish conclusion. “Talent” finds Jhabvala in New York City reflecting on the friction between family and societal expectations. Magda is a talent scout whose work is her entire life until she meets Ellie, a singer whose immense ability and unguarded personality captivate Magda. Soon Ellie is integrated into Magda’s extended family—for better or worse. This remarkable collection is the hallmark of Jhabvala’s celebrated career and a testament to her “balance, subtlety, wry humor, and beauty” (The New York Times).

Tales from the East and West

A Lovesong for India

Jhabvala explores nine possible lives. While each is located in deeply familiar territory, whether England, India, or America, and often overlaid with that essential Central European family background, each life is born of startlingly different origins and each reveals a different destiny.

Chapters of a Possible Past

My Nine Lives

How I Became a Holy Mother and Other Stories

Reflects a personal insight into how the country affects its inhabitants

Selected Stories

Out of India

Traces three generations of a family as, in their search for love and understanding, they come under the influence of an unusual therapist/guru

In Search of Love and Beauty

Twins Harriet and Michael Wishwell embark on a search for self that leads to India, where they both fall in love with the charismatic son of the "Transcendental Internationalism" leader, with catastrophic results

Three Continents

Taking us from a sweltering Indian rooftop at night to the marble halls of an ageing Bollywood star's palace, this is a new collection of short stories from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. A wedding is planned between two innocents at a crumbling mansion of a grand Hudson Valley estate, while among the white-socked convent girls of post-colonial New Delhi a mixed-race couple contemplate their son's alienation and the failure of hope. A young English girl infiltrates Fifth Avenue theatrical royalty and a lovely Broadway starlet exacts a clever, protracted revenge against her nemesis. Speaking of mortality and family rivalry, of the transfer of power from old to young, of love and the loss of innocence, this is a delicious assortment of fairytales and parables.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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