The Space Between Us

Poignant, evocative, and unforgettable, The Space Between Us is an intimate portrait of a distant yet familiar world. Set in modern-day India, it 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.

The Space Between Us takes students through the intersection of gender and class-how the lives of women from the working class and the middle class seem at once so connected and so removed from each other. This is a story of the ultimate choice between the bonds of gender and the division of class.

“Thrity Umrigar has a striking talent for portraying pain and suffering and the sheer unfairness of life. The result is a vital social comment on contemporary India.”-Financial Times