Heat and Dust - Hardcover

Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060121971 ISBN 13: 9780060121976

Publisher: Harper and Row, 1976

Synopsis

Light shelf wear to the book and price-clipped jacket, top edge dusty, else clean and umarked. First printing, full number line. With the Booker Prize sticker on the jacket. The book was made into an award winning merchan Ivory film of the same name. "Heat and Dust is the story of two English women living in India more than fifty years apart. Olivia shares a troubled marriage with Douglas Rivers, an English civil servant in the colonial India of the 1920s. Anne, Olivia's grand niece, comes to the subcontinent -- thirty years after the sun has set on the British empire -- to investigate Olivia's life, which her family regarded as "something dark and terrible." Shortly after her passage to India in 1923, the beautiful young Olivia finds herself bored by English colonial social circles -- she wonders how people who lead such exciting lives could remain so dull --though she is entranced by India itself. Olivia is introduced to the Nawab of Khatm, a romantic and decadent minor prince who enjoys a Forsterian intimacy with his British confidant, Harry. The willful Englishwoman begins going to Khatm to spend time with the Nawab and they fall in love, engaging in an affair that is not without wrenching consequences in her public and private lives.'--From the Merchant-Ivory description. Every effort is made to ship all books and other items within 24 hours. Clean recycled packing material will be used when possible. The Book Shed has a been a member of the Vermont Antiquarian Bookseller's Association since 1997. An online bookseller with a bookshop sensibility!

About this title

About the Author

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA was the author of twenty books. She was the recipient of Booker Prize, a MacArthur fellowship, and has been honored with an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Jhabvala's screenplays for Merchant-Ivory Productions earned two Academy Awards. She passed away in 2013.

Review

Heat and Dust views India through the lives of two English women living fifty years apart. Olivia is the first wife of an English government official assigned to India in the 1920s. The unnamed narrator the story is the young granddaughter of the same official by a later wife who, intrigued by family rumors about Olivia, travels to India seeking answers to Olivia's mysterious existence. How, in a segregated society, did Olivia meet an Indian prince of questionable character, and why did she leave her husband for him? What happened to her afterwards? As the narrator stays in the town where Olivia lived and visits places that influenced Olivia's life, we witness India's past through Olivia's letters and journals and the narrator's imagination. For Olivia, removed from the day-to-day existence of the Indian people, India "was like being not in a different part of this world but in another world altogether, in another reality." In contrast, the narrator sublets a room that shares a courtyard with an Indian family and learns much about their life. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala shows us both pre- and post-independent India, exposing the similarities and differences of India's impact on each of these women. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper and Row
• Publication date: 1976
• ISBN 10: 0060121971
• ISBN 13: 9780060121976
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 181