Sister India

“Payne captures an outsider’s sense of wonder.” —The Boston Herald

“Ms. Payne’s unblinkered, unsentimental but nonetheless affectionate portrait of India gives her book atmospheric power. Sister India…is an accomplished work by a writer with a keen sense of the precariousness of our lives and the distances we are prepared to go to escape them.” —The New York Times

“Peggy Payne proves…that her writer’s eye sees to the center of things—to the spiritual center of our beings, whether we’re from this side of the earth, or the other.”—Clyde Edgerton, author of Where Trouble Sleeps

“In Sister India, Payne displays a travel writers flair for capturing the sights, sounds and smells of an exotic land. Her descriptions of Varanasi are wonderfully vivid…But it is in the formidable Natraja that Payne’s writing shines most brightly.” —The Charlotte Observer

“Payne…creates a poetic mosaic of sights, smells, sounds, and tastes as she limns a square mile of Varanasi.” —Booklist

“Peggy Payne doesn’t bore us with east-is-liberation rhapsodies. Rather, Sister India is a quite passage to a stoic India…[that] doesn’t use the stark colors of cultural judgment to paint a market-friendly oriental exotica. It’s the gray areas that spread between the traveler and her not-so-easily-promising land that make this novel different from those exaggerated tour guides of the romantics doubling as works of art.” —India Today

“In Sister India, Peggy Payne has created a character as big as her territory, which is to say larger than life.” —Tony Wheeler, founder, Lonely Planet guides

“Sister India will…be compared…to E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India.”—Sunday Star News, (Wilmington, NC)

“Sister India is a book of wisdom, even one wants to say, of enlightenment…a modern-day Canterbury Tales.” —Independent Weekly

“A treasure-trove od sights and sounds and smells…For those of you who want…plain good story telling, Sister India is a keeper.” —Raleigh News & Observer

“Payne’s vision is unsettling and unforgettable. Her characters are vivid; their anger and fear are palpable. Her descriptions of Varanasi are acute and relentless, bringing the city viscerally to life…Sister India is a powerful examination of a group of estranged souls whose dreams and illusions mingle briefly with the smoke from the burning bodeis before disappearing before our eyes.” —The Commercial Appeal, (Memphis, TN)