How I Became a Holy Mother — Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Set, of course in India, these stories are concerned not so much with Europeans in India as with Indians themselves. They are about universal human passions -- yet interwoven with India itself. The heat, the vastness, the loneliness of India are all reflected in the lives of the people living in a country that is not so much an additional character as, often, the most central one. As always she tells her tales with compassion, penetration, humor, and the blithe gift of narration familiar to the hundreds of thousands who have seen the she scripted for the legendary Merchant Ivory team -- such as Howards End, The Remains of the Day, A Room with a View, and her own Heat and Dust -- and who have delighted in her novels.