Each morning, Bhima, a domestic servant in contemporary Bombay, leaves her own small shanty in the slums to tend to another woman's house. In Sera Dubash's home, Bhima scrubs the floors of a house in which she remains an outsider. She cleans furniture she is not permitted to sit on.

She washes glasses from which she is not allowed to drink. Sera is an upper-middle-class Parsi housewife whose opulent surroundings hide the shame and disappointment of her abusive marriage. Bhima, a stoic illiterate hardened by a life of despair and loss, has worked in the Dubash household for more than twenty years.

Cursed by fate, she sacrifices all for her beautiful, headstrong granddaughter, Maya, a university student whose education —paid for by Sera —will enable them to escape the slums. Poignant and compelling, evocative and unforgettable, The Space Between Us is an intimate portrait of a distant yet familiar world. Set in modern-day India and witnessed through two compelling and achingly real women, the novel shows how the lives of the rich and the poor are intrinsically connected yet vastly removed from each other, and vividly captures how the bonds of womanhood are pitted against the divisions of class and culture.