Man Booker Prize Winners & Finalists (1975)

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Publisher's Comments:

Set in India , Heat and Dust is the story of Olivia, a beautiful, spoiled, bored English colonial wife in the 1920s who is drawn inexorably into the spell of the Nawab, a minor Indian prince deeply involved in plots and intrigues. Olivia outrages the tiny, suffocating town where her husband is a civil servant by eloping with the captivating Nawab.

It is also the story of Olivia's step-granddaughter who, fifty years later, is drawn to India by her fascination with the letters left behind by the now dead older woman, and by her obsession with solving the enigma of Olivia's scandal.

A penetrating and compassionate love story, this brilliant novel immerses the reader in the heat, dust, and squalor of India , while providing a compelling mixture of the spiritual and the sensual.

Publisher's Comments:

"The unimaginable slaughter that has become the First World War has continued unabated since August 1914, and now, in the late fall of 1918, on an obscure railway siding at Compiègne , France , a group of intractable old men gather to negotiate an armistice. With Allied victory a certainty, monumental old Marshall Foch, flanked by Maxime Weygand and British Admiral Wemyss, seeks to crush the enemy at the negotiating table. With the Kaiser in seclusion, idealist Matthias Erzberger has been dispatched to pick what shards of mercy he can from the wreckage of the old order. As the Allied leaders press for total submission, Erzberger, haunted by the prospect of famine and revolution in the gathering German winter, angles for better terms. And so they talk on and on, as the guns roar and men continue to die.

"With the acute historical sensibility that is the hallmark of his work, Thomas Keneally has re-created the forging of the armistice in an illuminating and intimate portrayal of personal prejudice and political obstinacy."

Longlist information for 1975 is not available; the Booker Prize did not release longlists until 2001.

Angus Wilson (Chair), Peter Ackroyd, Susan Hill, and Roy Fuller