At the End of the Century

At the End of the Century: the Stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, 439 p.

Jhabvala is one of my all-time favorite writers.  As a young person, she was a refugee from Eastern Europe to England, where she later met and married her husband, an Indian architect.  She spent most of her life in Delhi, but in later years also lived in New York, and most of  her fiction is set in one of these two locales.  After her death in 2013 her children collected this volume of some of her most important stories, and they reflect her frequent themes of gurus and charismatics who hold others in thrall, to everyone's detriment.  All are told with the beautifully precise observation of someone who spent her life as an outsider.  The collection contained many stories I had read previously, but there were a few that were originally published in The New Yorker that I had missed.  As always, these are a pleasure.