The Space Between Us: A Novel (Harper Perennial Olive Editions) - Softcover

Umrigar, Thrity

4.02

49,854 ratings by Goodreads

9780062564641: The Space Between Us: A Novel (Harper Perennial Olive Editions)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062564641 ISBN 13: 9780062564641

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2016

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The national bestselling novel—from the author of Bombay Time, If Today Be Sweet, and The Weight of Heaven—vividly captures the social struggles of modern India in a luminous, addictively readable novel of honor, tradition, class, gender, and family—now available in a limited Olive Edition.

“Umrigar is a skilled storyteller, and her memorable characters will live on for a long time.”—Washington Post Book World

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, author Thrity 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.

Poignant, evocative, and unforgettable, The Space Between Us is an intimate portrait of a distant yet familiar world.

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Review:

The Space Between Us, Thrity Umrigar's poignant novel about a wealthy woman and her downtrodden servant, offers a revealing look at class and gender roles in modern day Bombay. Alternatively told through the eyes of Sera, a Parsi widow whose pregnant daughter and son-in-law share her elegant home, and Bhima, the elderly housekeeper who must support her orphaned granddaughter, Umrigar does an admirable job of creating two sympathetic characters whose bond goes far deeper than that of employer and employee.

When we first meet Bhima, she is sharing a thin mattress with Maya, the granddaughter upon whom high hopes and dreams were placed, only to be shattered by an unexpected pregnancy and its disastrous consequences. As time goes on, we learn that Sera and her family have used their power and money time and time again to influence the lives of Bhima and Maya, from caring for Bhima's estranged husband after a workplace accident, to providing the funds for Maya's college education. We also learn that Sera's seemingly privileged life is not as it appears; after enduring years of cruelty under her mother-in-law's roof, she faced physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her husband, pain that only Bhima could see and alleviate. Yet through the triumphs and tragedies, Sera and Bhima always shared a bond that transcended class and race; a bond shared by two women whose fate always seemed to rest in the hands of others, just outside their control.

Told in a series of flashbacks and present day encounters, The Space Between Us gains strength from both plot and prose. A beautiful tale of tragedy and hope, Umrigar's second novel is sure to linger in readers' minds. --Gisele Toueg

From the Back Cover:

LIMITED EDITION

“Perhaps there are no phantom pains at all; perhaps all pain is real; perhaps each long-ago blow lives on into eternity in some different permutation and shape.”

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