To celebrate the release of the paperback of The World We Found, two backlist titles will also be on tour: The Weight of Heaven and The Space Between Us.
About The World We Found
• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (July 31, 2012)
As university students in late 1970s Bombay, Armaiti, Laleh, Kavita, and Nishta were inseparable. Spirited and unconventional, they challenged authority and fought for a better world. But over the past thirty years, the quartet has drifted apart, the day-to-day demands of work and family tempering the revolutionary fervor they once shared.
Then comes devastating news: Armaiti, who moved to America, is gravely ill and wants to see the old friends she left behind. For Laleh, reunion is a bittersweet reminder of unfulfilled dreams and unspoken guilt. For Kavita, it is an admission of forbidden passion. For Nishta, it is the promise of freedom from a bitter, fundamentalist husband. And for Armaiti, it is an act of acceptance, of letting go on her own terms.
The World We Found is a dazzling masterwork from the remarkable Thrity Umrigar, offering an unforgettable portrait of modern India while it explores the enduring bonds of friendship and the power of love to change lives.
About The Weight of Heaven
When Frank and Ellie Benton lose their only child, seven-year-old Benny, to a sudden illness, the perfect life they had built is shattered. Filled with wrenching memories, their Ann Arbor home becomes unbearable, and their marriage founders. Then an unexpected job half a world away in Girbaug, India, offers them an opportunity to start again. But Frank’s befriending of Ramesh—a bright, curious boy who quickly becomes the focus of his attentions—will lead the grieving man down an ever-darkening path with stark repercussions.
A devastating look at cultural clashes and divides, Thrity Umrigar’s The Weight of Heaven is a rare glimpse of a family and a country struggling under pressures beyond their control.
About 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.
About Thrity Umrigar
Thrity Umrigar is the author of three other novels—The Space Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, and Bombay Time—and the memoir First Darling of the Morning. A journalist for 17 years, she is the winner of the Nieman Fellowship to Harvard University and a 2006 finalist for the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. An associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, Umrigar lives in Cleveland.
Thrity’s Tour Stops
Tuesday, July 31st: Write Meg! – The World We Found
Friday, August 3rd: Reading on a Rainy Day – The Space Between Us
Monday, August 6th: Lit and Life – The World We Found
Tuesday, August 7th: The House of the Seven Tails – The World We Found
Wednesday, August 8th: Jo-Jo Loves to Read! – The World We Found
Thursday, August 9th: I Read. Do you? – The World We Found
Monday, August 13th: Gone Bookserk – The Weight of Heaven
Tuesday, August 14th: Bibliosue – The World We Found
Wednesday, August 15th: Walking With Nora – The World We Found
Wednesday, August 15th: Silver & Grace – The Weight of Heaven
Thursday, August 16th: Broken Teepee – The Space Between Us
Friday, August 17th: Paperback Princeess – The Weight of Heaven
Monday, August 20th: Peeking Between the Pages – The World We Found
Tuesday, August 21st: Laura’s Reviews – The Weight of Heaven
Wednesday, August 22nd: My Bookshelf – The World We Found
Thursday, August 23rd: Savvy Verse & Wit – The World We Found
Friday, August 24th: The Written World – The Space Between Us
Monday, August 27th: Bibliophiliac – The World We Found
Tuesday, August 28th: Caribousmom – The World We Found
Wednesday, August 29th: Books in the Burbs – The Space Between Us
Wednesday, August 29th: Life in the Thumb – The Weight of Heaven
Thursday, August 30th: missris – The Space Between Us