Thrity Time

Though one hasn't read any of Thrity Umrigar's work yet, Francis Itani's appreciative review of The Space Between Us makes her sound very much like Rohinton Mistry:

"Thrity Umrigar has created two wonderfully sympathetic characters who do much to make [India's] complex nature comprehensible...This is a story intimately and compassionately told against the sensuous background of everyday life in Bombay....The tragedy is that there is so little to hope for. Which brings us to the implicit, pivotal question raised at the beginning and end of the book: Why survive at all in the face of continuous despair?"