The Secrets Between Us

Thrity Umrigar is the author of seven novels Everybody's Son, The Story Hour, The World We Found, The Weight of Heaven, The Space Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, and Bombay Time; a memoir, First Darling of the Morning; and a children's picture book, When I Carried You in My Belly. A former journalist, she was awarded a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard and was a finalist for the PEN Beyond Margins Award. A professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, she lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

"The women at the heart of this novel inhabit the harsh world of the urban Indian poor, and struggle separately and together for dignity and survival. Thrity Umrigar has written a moving human tale that vividly brings to life both the women and the city of Mumbai." - Salman Rushdie

"This wonderful novel... is the rich, moving story of an amazing friendship... The lives of Bhima and Parvati are ones of unbelievable poverty and struggle, but the dignity and richness their friendship manifests took my breath away." - Indies Choice Audiobook of the Year Finalist

"The Secrets Between Us is a powerful, urgent novel that wields issues of gender and class like a blade. The weight of Bhima's tragic past and her intractable present finds its counterbalance in the most unlikely of characters: Parvati, an elderly homeless woman who is haunted by a history of her own. This intergenerational novel asks hard questions about who we are, who we can become, and what awaits on the other side of our becoming. Thrity Umrigar is known as a bold and generous writer, and The Secrets Between Us only further establishes her reputation." - Wiley Cash, author of The Last Ballad

"The Secrets Between Us broke me open as thoroughly as any novel I've read in recent years. Bhima and Parvati, two proud, aging women hard-used by life, are as unlikely a pair of heroes as one could imagine, and yet they jump from these pages big and true as life, striving, surviving, learning to hope and even love long past the point where such things have come to seem like a cruel joke. Thrity Umrigar has given us yet another brilliant powerhouse of a novel." - Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

"Umrigar's writing is vivid and elegant in its specificity, and the story is as resilient as its characters." - Minneapolis Star Tribune