Heat and Dust

Heat and Dust is a novel by the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, published in 1975. It won the Booker Prize that year, and it was later ranked by The Telegraph among the greatest Asian novels.

The novel opens in the first person, in the voice of an unnamed woman who has come to India to learn more about Olivia, the first wife of her grandfather. She has brought Olivia's letters with her, and by reading them, and by living in the country herself, she starts to reconstruct what Olivia's life was like during the British Raj in the 1920s.

The reader experiences Olivia's story through flashbacks. Olivia is married to an English civil servant and appears to be a proper colonial wife, but she is smothered by the small, suffocating town where her husband is posted. She is drawn inexorably into the spell of the Nawab, a minor Indian prince caught up in plots and intrigues, and she outrages the town by eloping with him. The two women's lives, seventy years apart, are laid alongside each other.