Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was a British and American screenwriter and novelist. She was born May 7, 1927 and passed away April 3, 2013.

She is perhaps best known for the collaboration that she did with Merchant Ivory Productions, which is made up of film director James Ivory and the producer Ismail Merchant.

In 1951, she got married to Cyrus Jhabvala, an Indian architect. She then began to elaborate upon her experiences in India, writing novels and tales on Indian subjects. She would go on to write a dozen novels, twenty-three screenplays, and eight collections of short stories.

Ruth was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Diplomatic Service and the Overseas List of the 1998 New Years Honors. She was also granted a joint fellowship in 2002 by BAFTA with Ivory and Merchant. She is the only person to have won both an Oscar and a Booker Prize.

The author was born in Cologne, Germany. Her parents were Jewish, Marcus being a lawyer who had moved to Germany to escape conscription in Poland. Meanwhile, her mother’s father was the cantor of the largest synagogue in Cologne. Her father was accused of communist links and their family fled the Nazi regime in 1939, moving to Britain. Her older brother was a fellow of The Queen’s College and Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford.

During the second World War, Prawer lived in London, went through the Blitz, and started speaking English over German. She would read the works of authors such as Charles Dickens and Margaret Mitchell, which kept her company during the war years, reading Gone with the Wind while in air raid shelters during the bombing of London.

She officially became a British citizen in 1948. The following year, her father committed suicide after finding out the horrific news that forty members of his family were murdered in the Holocaust. She would attend Hendon County School and later Queen Mary College, graduating with her MA in English literature in 1951.

She moved to India in 1951 after marrying her husband, the Indian Parsi architect Cyrus Jhabvala. Her first novel was published in 1955, titled To Whom She Will. The Householder was filmed in 1963 by Merchant and Ivory with a screenplay written herself. She also wrote scripts for The Guru in 1969 and Autobiography of a Princess in 1975. She also collaborated with Ivory for screenplays Bombay Talkie and the ABC After-School Special ‘William- The Life and Times of William Shakespeare’.

She won the Booker Prize in 1975 for Heat and Dust, a novel that would later be adapted into a movie. She moved to New York that same year, writing her novel The Place of Peace there. Her husband moved to the United States permanently in the late 1980s, living on the east coast until she passed away in 2013. Her husband would pass away shortly after in 2014.

Jhabvala continued to be ill at ease with India and all that it brought into her life. She even wrote an essay published in London Magazine titled ‘Myself in India’ where she wrote that India was intolerable to her thanks to the country being an animal ‘of poverty and backwardness’. The early works that she had written in India largely have to deal with themes of romantic love and arranged marriages while showcasing idealism, chaos and social mores.

The author was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984.

In Search of Love and Beauty is a 1983 novel from author Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. This is an observant and insightful novel which shows the interior lives of three different generations of people who are on a quest for love and beauty.

Louise is not content with the gentle affection of her husband and is wanting to reclaim her youth by engaging in social and spiritual adventures. Meanwhile, her daughter Mariettta is looking for beauty in lofty ideas as well as her obsession for her son Mark.

Mark thinks that love should be found in the pursuit of the money and the young, vacuous lovers out there. Leo is their eccentric self-style guru, and he satisfies himself with power– in the process commanding the bodies and the souls of his followers. Read this book for a time-tested book that will hold up just as well as it did when it was released and is still relevant today.

Shards of Memory is a 1995 novel from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Showing the author’s clever twists of irony and humor, this book brings several lifespans full of hope and ideals within grasp.

In this novel, a young man by the name of Henry sits down with his grandmother. She is a genial lady that is still referred to as ‘Baby’ by everyone she knows. They’re meeting in the Manhattan townhouse where he has lived for all of his life to record the history of a spiritual movement that has been woven into the fabric of all their family’s lives over the course of four generations.

What ends up unfolding is a mesmerizing family written down in the pages that seem real by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. This includes the imperious great-grandmother Elsa and her husband, the Indian poet. They have an unconventional marriage that mirrors the movement that they help to found.

There is also their cheerfully pragmatic daughter Baby, who is married to Graeme, an aloof English diplomat. Beside him is the bemused and brooding Renata, the daughter of Baby and Graeme. She is married to an idle and lazy dreamer. Then there is Henry, the son of Renata who shows in many ways that he bears the legacy of all that has gone before.

Their lives and those of the movement’s founder the Master intertwine, collide and diverge with each other in a story that covers the 20th century and multiple continents. Insightful, satirical, and moving, this novel is a wonderfully written story that involves many themes such as faith, family, love, and devotion, not to mention the complex nature of memory itself. Check out this engaging novel and read it all for yourself!