Heat and Dust

The Booker Prize-winning novel--intertwining the narratives of two women, past and present, and their relationships to India--from the novelist, short story writer, and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Partly 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 and independence, Olivia is drawn into the spell of the Nawab, a minor Indian prince deeply involved in gang raids and criminal plots. She is intrigued by the Nawab's charm and aggressive courtship, and soon begins to spend most of her days in his company. But then she becomes pregnant, and unsure of the child's paternity, she is faced with a wrenching dilemma. Her reaction to the crisis humiliates her husband and outrages the British community, breeding a scandal that lives in collective memory long after her death, and will compel her future granddaughter to investigate their family's secrets.

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA, born in 1927, wrote several novels and short stories, and, in collaboration with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, won two Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay (for Howards End and A Room with a View). She won the Booker Prize in 1975 for Heat and Dust. Her other numerous accolades include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and an O. Henry Prize. She died in 2013.