The Space Between Us

Bhima works as a domestic servant in Bombay, and each day she enters the home of Sera, a wealthy Parsi widow. The caste system shapes nearly every relationship in the city, so the two women occupy worlds that barely touch. Still, as they spend time together, an emotional bond forms between them, one that pulls against the boundaries each has been raised to accept.

Through their story, Umrigar examines honor, tradition, class, gender and family in modern India. The novel follows the constraints each woman faces and what it costs to step outside them, all set against the sights and routines of everyday life in Bombay.

Umrigar is the author of Bombay Time, If Today Be Sweet and The Weight of Heaven. This novel is presented as her second. Comparisons are drawn with Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible.