The Space Between Us: A Multilayered Novel of Honor, Tradition, and Gender Struggles in Modern India

“This is a story intimately and compassionately told against the sensuous background of everyday life in Bombay.” —Washington Post Book World

“Bracingly honest.” —New York Times Book Review

A beautifully designed Harper Perennial Deluxe Edition of Thrity Umrigar's critically acclaimed and bestselling novel—a luminous, unforgettable story of honor, tradition, class, gender, and family set in modern-day India.

The Space Between Us is the story of two compelling and achingly real women: Sera Dubash, an upper-middle-class Parsi housewife whose opulent surroundings hide the shame and disappointment of her abusive marriage, and Bhima, a stoic illiterate hardened by a life of despair and loss, who has worked in the Dubash household for more than twenty years. A powerful and perceptive literary masterwork, Umrigar's extraordinary novel demonstrates how the lives of the rich and poor are intrinsically connected yet vastly removed from each other, and how the strong bonds of womanhood are eternally opposed by the divisions of class and culture. It is a story that echoes the timeless intensity of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible—a quintessential triumph of modern literary fiction.