Book Club: Disinheritance

Disinheritance: The Rediscovered Stories

A collection of fiction by the Booker Prize–winning author and “one of the 20th century’s great female writers” (The Washington Post), drawn from her ample body of work that has been out of the public eye for decades

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala began publishing fiction in 1956 and continued to do so until her death in 2013. Disinheritance showcases some of the finest of these efforts, all demonstrating Jhabvala’s powers of keen observation as she examines the westernization of India’s middle class, the interplay of social and romantic ambition, and the social mores that plague her characters, regardless of their geographical background. Salman Rushdie has described her as a “rootless intellectual,” and John Updike called her an “initiated outsider.” All these qualities shine in this very special collection, with stories undiscovered for decades.

Including an introduction from the author’s 1979 lecture when awarded the Neil Gunn Prize in Scotland, Disinheritance balances a host of cultural influences to showcase Jhabvala’s signature voice and her buoyant, satiric fiction.

(Text: Penguin Random House)

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Germany. Following the pogroms of November 1938 the family fled their home in Cologne to England. Ruth was raised in the UK in the 1940s; she and her husband would live both in his native India and in her New York working base in the following decades. As this citizen of the world drew high praise for novels and short stories, winning the prestigious Booker Prize for her work, she was asked to write the screenplay adaptation for Merchant Ivory’s first feature — and the rest is screen history. Jhabvala won two Academy Awards, for her E.M. Forster adaptations A Room with a View and Howards End, and was nominated again for The Remains of the Day. She was later made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

About Our Guests

James Francis Ivory is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He was a principal in Merchant Ivory Productions along with Indian film producer Ismail Merchant (his domestic and professional partner) and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The trio made film adaptations of stories by authors such as E.M. Forster and Henry James, as well as Ruth's own work. Their body of work is celebrated for its elegance, sophistication, literary fidelity, strong performances, complex themes, and rich characters.

Merchant–Ivory was established in 1961 in India where they made modestly budgeted films including The Householder (1963), Shakespeare Wallah (1965), and Bombay Talkie (1970). Ivory began adapting films from classic novels such as The Europeans (1979), Quartet (1981), Heat and Dust (1983), The Bostonians (1984), Maurice (1987), and Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990). During this period he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for A Room with a View (1985), Howards End (1992), and The Remains of the Day (1993). At the age of 89, Ivory won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his work on Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name (2017), becoming the oldest competitive Academy Award winner.

Sam Sacks writes the Fiction Chronicle for the Wall Street Journal and is an editor at Open Letters Review. His literary criticism has appeared in Harper's, the London Review of Books, Commentary, The New Republic and elsewhere.

Where to purchase the book:

https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/disinheritance/

https://www.amazon.com/Disinheritance-Rediscovered-Ruth-Prawer-Jhabvala/dp/1640097368