The Householder - Softcover

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349142777 ISBN 13: 9780349142777

Publisher: Abacus, 2018

Synopsis

Prem is a recently married teacher who is neither very good at teaching nor at being married. He is promised an ally against his wife Indu, whom he regards with varying degrees of irritation, when his mother comes to visit. He soon finds, though, that maternal interference is far from helpful, and he receives comfort from an entirely unexpected quarter - his wife - as he discovers through her the joys of being a 'settled husband and householder'.

From every page rise the heat, the smells, the flashing iridescent colours and the ceaseless rhythms of Indian life. And such is the strength of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's humorous and perceptive pen that this appealing tale of a young man trying to come to terms with marriage and maturity becomes more than a highly comic vignette of a particular society - it is also a reflection of a universal experience.

About this title

Review:

Deliciously droll, wickedly irreverent and altogether most satisfying (New York Times Book Review)

All the figures in the book are irresistible comic manifestations. And they are fashioned in a prose that seems, without exertion, to have written itself (New Yorker)

A delightfully lively and mobile story (New Statesman)

I can't describe the humour, charm and deft obliquity with which Jhabvala draws from Prem's small self-knowledge . . . a cross-section as brilliantly penetrating as V. S. Naipaul's West Indian comedies: the picture of a society which has always known that dignity is the most precarious, absurd and rare of man's inventions (Spectator)

Book Description:

The classic novel from the Booker and Oscar-winning author of Heat and Dust, published by Abacus for the first time in a beautiful new edition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Abacus
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0349142777
• ISBN 13: 9780349142777
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224