From Simon & Schuster, Esmond in India is Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s novel following a young Indian woman who returns to post-Independence Delhi from Oxford University. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has constructed a richly ripe Indian comedy of manners. She strips bare that certain section of affluent Indian society which is particularly vulnerable to the seductions of an imperial presence, and brilliantly and wittily crystallizes some of the confusions that bedevilled India at the dawn of Independence.