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Thrity Umrigar is the bestselling author of eight novels, including The Space Between Us, which was a finalist for the PEN/Beyond Margins Award, as well as a memoir and three picture books. Her books have been translated into several languages and published in more than fifteen countries. She is the winner of a Lambda Literary Award and a Seth Rosenberg Award and is Distinguished Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University. A former prize-winning journalist, she has contributed to the Boston Globe , the Washington Post, the New York Times and Huffington Post.
Thrity Umrigar's website
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Reclaiming Honor
In 1993, my middle-aged father stood on our balcony and watched helplessly as the apartment building across the street burned. It had been set on fire by a mob of angry Hindus who had heard that a Muslim family lived on the ground floor.
By this time, I was living in faraway America, safe from the paroxysm of insanity and violence that gripped Bombay—the erstwhile most tolerant and cosmopolitan of Indian cities—during that terrible period. But I can still hear the bewilderment in my father's voice as he later recounted the incident during our weekly phone chat. I immediately worried about my family's well-being, but he brushed aside my fretting. We were Parsis, a small, prosperous, and educated religious minority in India; the joke was that there were so few of us, nobody saw us as any kind of threat.
What I learned much later from the Muslim family who lived next door to us was that they had earlier brought all their jewelry to Dad for safekeeping before they fled the neighborhood for a few weeks. There were many sad stories of families returning home after the riots ended and finding that those whom they'd trusted with their assets had swindled them. My dad, on the other hand, had made our ...
Aravind Adiga is the author of The White Tiger, which was awarded the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Last Man in Tower, and a collection of stories, Between the Assassinations. He was born in India and attended Columbia and Oxford ... (more)
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Monica Ali is the daughter of English and Bangladeshi parents.
She came to England at the age of three, and her first home was Bolton in Greater Manchester. Ali later studied at Oxford University.
Her first novel, Brick ...
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If you enjoyed:
The Space Between Us
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Brick Lane
by Monica Ali
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