-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel, Parul Kapur's Inside the Mirror is set in the aftermath of colonialism, as an impoverished India struggles to remake itself into a modern state. Jaya's story encompasses art, history, political revolt, love, and women's ambition to seize their own power.
In 1950s Bombay, Jaya Malhotra studies medicine at the direction of her father, a champion of women's education who assumes the right to choose his daughters' vocations. A talented painter drawn to the city's dynamic new modern art movement, Jaya is driven by her desire to express both the pain and extraordinary force of life of a nation rising from the devastation of British rule. Her twin sister, Kamlesh, a passionate student of Bharata Natyam dance, complies with her father's decision that she become a schoolteacher while secretly pursuing forbidden dreams of dancing onstage and in the movies.
When Jaya moves out of her family home to live with a woman mentor, she suffers grievous consequences as a rare woman in the men's domain of art. Not only does her departure from home threaten her family's standing and crush her reputation; Jaya loses a vital connection to Kamlesh.
"This is a beautiful exploration of the hardships endured by women artists." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"An engaging examination of female independence and familial devotion." —Kirkus Reviews
"Inside the Mirror is an extraordinary and moving story about twin sisters Jaya and Kamlesh as they struggle to pursue their passion and independence as women artists from a conservative society. Crafted with elegance and precision, and heartrending in its exploration of family drama, this novel is a beautiful and ambitious work of fiction." —Brandon Hobson, National Book Award finalist and author of The Removed
"With breathtaking lyricism and scorching insight, Kapur captures women in flux brilliantly. This profound book complicates the impact of colonialism and throbs with life. Inside the Mirror is an extraordinary novel." —Jennifer Maritza McCauley, author of When Trying to Return Home
"Inside the Mirror is a complex and compelling story of a displaced family living in the shadow of post-Partition India. Parul Kapur has written a gorgeous novel about art, independence, and the roots that bind a family together." —Devi S. Laskar, author of Circa and The Atlas of Reds and Blues
This information about Inside the Mirror was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Parul Kapur was born in Assam, India, grew up in the United States, and lives in Atlanta. She is a fiction writer, journalist, and literary critic whose writing has appeared in a number of publications, including Ploughshares, Pleiades, the New Yorker, Art in America, Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Paris Review. Kapur holds an MFA from Columbia University and has received fellowships from the Hambidge Center and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
If you liked Inside the Mirror, try these:
by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Published 2021
International-award-winning author Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's novel is a sweeping and powerful portrait of a young girl and her family: who they are, what history has taken from them, and--most importantly--how they find their way back to each other.
Published as The First Woman in the UK.
by Jayant Kaikini
Published 2020
For readers of Jhumpa Lahiri and Rohinton Mistry, as well as Lorrie Moore and George Saunders, here are stories on the pathos and comedy of small-town migrants struggling to build a life in the big city, with the dream world of Bollywood never far away.
by Madhuri Vijay
Published 2019
Gorgeously tactile and sweeping in historical and socio-political scope, Pushcart Prize-winner Madhuri Vijay's The Far Field follows a complicated flaneuse across the Indian subcontinent as she reckons with her past, her desires, and the tumultuous present.
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
