Inside the Mirror

1,Winner of the AWP Prize for the Novel Winner of the 2025 Georgia Author of the Year Award Longlisted for the Center for Fiction's 2024 First Novel Prize Longlisted for the 2024 New American Voices Award Honorable Mention for the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book Award in Literary Fiction Finalist for the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book Award in Multicultural Fiction Winner of the 2024 American Fiction Award in Literary Fiction Finalist for the 2024 American Fiction Award in Multicultural Fiction Named a Ms. Magazine's Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2024 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. 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.