Heat and Dust: A Novel

Winner of the Booker Prize, this profound and powerful novel intertwines two stories of two Indias over half a century.
 
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. The Times praised Jhabvala’s eighth novel as “a book of cool, controlled brilliance . . . a jewel to be treasured,” while the Guardian called “her tussle with India . . . one of the richest treats of contemporary literature.”
 
“An obscure and somber novel, tense with undisclosed judgments and meanings that crouch and whisper just beyond one’s reach.” —New York Times

• At the End of the Century: The Stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
• Out of India: Selected Stories
• Travelers
• The Householder: A Novel (The Norton Library)
• The Inheritance of Loss
• A Lovesong for India
• The Wedding Dog
• Mistaken
• East Into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi
• Staying On: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction)