Set during the final days of the British Raj, Leaving Malabar Hill is the story of betrayal and espionage, with a marriage between a Brooklyn Jewish writer and an Indian-Jain physician at the center. While ratcheting communal tensions put India on edge, the woman gets embroiled in an affair with an Irgun operative and is unknowingly swept into an arms trafficking scheme and a terrorist plot to bomb British clubs in Bombay and Jerusalem.

Diane Mehta grew up in Bombay and moved to the States when she was seven, the product of a marriage between a Brooklyn Jew and an Indian-Jain physician. Leaving Malabar Hill is loosely based on that marriage, but takes place during an earlier era of Indian history, and is heightened with a terrorist plot and extramarital affair. It unfolds on the cusp of Indian Independence and Israeli statehood.

The novel explores the difficulties of an upper middle class Jewish and Jain family struggling to cope amid the political upheaval of Partition. The major themes are Jewish exile and the expat life, the dynamics of love between people from two psychologically different cultures, and the moral uncertainties of being a freedom fighter versus a terrorist in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. The characters all seek to understand, and offer variations on, what it means to be Jewish, Jain, Hindu, and Muslim. The cross-culturalization of the characters echoes the mixed nature of Bombay itself, a city built on migration, clashing interests, and increasingly divided sense of nationality.

Driving the story of the novel are the tensions that war and massive structural change bring about, the work of loving and forgiveness, the difficulty of being an educated or ambitious woman and feminist in the forties, and the yearning to be an artist.