His most ambitious yet, taking the reader into lurid, scarcely imaginable worlds of mysticism . . . Dalrymple has an inimitable way of conjuring the Indian landscape

Financial Times

Beautifully written, ridiculously erudite, warm and open-hearted . . . A towering talent

The Times

A blend of travelogue, ethnography, oral history and reportage, Nine Lives is compelling and poignant

Guardian

The reader gets the sense that the author is driven by an unquenchable curiosity about a country he loves. Dalrymple never mocks his subjects. Indeed, his prose is often tinged with tenderness and a sense of longing. In dashes of brilliance, Dalrymple's work reveals an India still rich in religious experience, its spiritual quest – or rather, quests – still very much part of the warp and weft of daily life. Amid all the excitement about economic growth, an older India endures

Sadanand Dhume, Wall Street Journal

At its best travel writing beats fiction, firing the imagination with tales of foreign peoples drawn close by our common humanity . . . This is travel writing at its best. I hope it sparks a revival

Ruaridh Nicoll, Observer

Nine Lives remains oddly gripping, and often very moving, in its first-person accounts of spiritually-minded people that Dalrymple meets on his travels across the subcontinent

Pankaj Mishra, The National