It’s an investigation into deep grief and what shapes us, but also it’s a study in observational precision and the moments that add up to a life well-lived.

The writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927 – 2013) lived a life that spanned numerous wars and traversed the globe. She wrote novels and screenplays; Heat and Dust, her eighth, garnered the Man Booker Prize in 1975, and her E.M. Forster-adapted screenplays, A Room with a View and Howards End, both won Oscars. This month brings her posthumous collection of stories into the world, At the End of the Century (Counterpoint Press, 2018).