With twenty Nobel Prize nominations to his credit, E. M. Forster may reasonably be considered one of the best writers of the 20th century – perhaps of all time. He is best known for his 1924 novel A Passage to India. But almost all his writings met with rapid critical, popular and international success.

Forster’s world-view was exceptionally broad – even multi-cultural – as expressed in the humanism characterizing all his works, in the wide-ranging social criticism of Howard’s End, and in the spiritual and mystical themes for which A Passage to India is famous, and which also underlie the stories collected in The Celestial Omnibus. - Summary by Kirsten Wever