Visionary fiction. Novels with the feel of the supernatural, spiritual, paranormal present and active in our physical world. “…Mesmerizing…” The New York Times calls Sister India.
At work painting in her studio, commercial artist Andie Branson has a sudden, shocking spiritual experience, a brush with the divine that is seductive and terrifying.
She has long hungered for whatever would force her out of her familiar limits, her increasingly narrow routine. But her spiritual hunger, her reaction to the experience, leads her first to compulsive sex, a sort of abandonment of herself, which is not the expansiveness she’d had in mind. She is shocked, appalled at losing self-control.
APPETITES PHYSICAL AND SPIRITUAL
Sex and spirituality seem contradictory to some, but they do coexist very powerfully. God and sex can be on the same page, perhaps stirring new feelings and thoughts about both.
This dark and raw, yet ultimately redemptive story follows a brave and very troubled young woman to a triumphant new start on life.
VISIONARY FICTION
One of the most intense psychological thrillers, Cobalt Blue is an erotic and spiritual pilgrimage, winner of an IPPY for Visionary Fiction.
For fans of The Magus by John Fowles or John Updike’s blend of religion and sexuality or Doris Lessing.
When a college town minister hears the voice of God, the doubts and confusion he experiences threaten his career and his marriage, test his conscience and his soul.
The Rev. Swain Hammond had never believed in a God speaking out loud in English in his back yard. But he knows what he heard. it’s undeniable.
His situation is made more difficult by the fact that his Chapel Hill congregation is largely UNC professors and their families. Is their cool brainy pastor losing his mind?
SPIRITUAL EMERGENCY
This might sound like the premise of a comic story. It’s not. Revelation unfolds the story of a man in spiritual crisis, spiritual emergency, and the people who admire and fear for him.
For fans of Susan Howatch’s Starbridge novels or work of John Updike or any literary spiritual fiction.
A troubled young American woman tries to start life anew in a Hindu holy city on the Ganges.
After an incident of devastating violence for which she feels some responsibility, Estelle leaves home in her small Southern town. She flees to Varanasi, taking a new name and gradually a radically changed appearance.
IN A HOLY CITY
She hides her beauty in hundreds of pounds of fat, because she feels it sparked the trouble she wants to forget. She hides her tender feelings behind an angry manner. She is reclusive, rarely leaves the guesthouse on the river where she is manager. Instead she communes with the river.
But trouble follows her here. Love too finds her again. She becomes embroiled in a web of hot religious conflict suffused with unlikely intimacy.
Sister India is a Varanasi novel, an odd sort of love story unfolding in a city heavy with the smoke of burning pyres, with intense religiosity, conflict, and the prayers of pilgrims for many thousands of years.
For fans of India fiction, especially by Manil Suri, Anita Desai, or Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, or of Robertson Davies’ Deptford trilogy.
“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.”