Heat & Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - 1976

New York: Harper & Row, 1976. First American Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/very good. 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!