"A fascinating book that transcends conventional genre divisions and combines several elements: of memoir, travelogue, history, philosophy and fiction. What in a journalist’s hands might just have been reportage turns in the hands of this creative writer into a well-conceived, layered narrative, a work of excellent prose.… Recorded historical facts and unrecorded legends get intertwined to produce a unique text, whose texture we will never know comes from where, from the idiom that varies from the intensely lyrical to the factually objective or from a heady mixture of aptly-quoted passages of poetry and ably narrated stories or again from the dizzying passages from one period and one place to another period and another place."
 
-- Frontline India

"Spunky… It is both Hariharan’s singular, homegrown cosmopolitanism and her mellow perspective as a distinguished Indian novelist that inform the book’s story, of shifting ideas of time and place.... The book’s ten journeys crisscross the world confidently.… [Hariharan] is capable of wonderful moments of hilarity.… Hariharan explains: ‘In 2013, I went to Palestine with the heavy baggage of half-knowledge, conscious I was following in the steps of a long trail of travellers and, like some of them, determined to acquit myself with honour.’ Half-knowledge is increasingly a burden for readers and writers competing to know everything in an internet and social media-enabled free-flow, and she bravely takes on the challenge of seeing this through on the ground. She need not have worried about acquittal.… Hariharan is among the small crop of writers the ‘90s gave us, closer to home than the Anita Desais and certainly the Rushdies; thus comfortingly familiar. She is sometimes overlooked for louder, more showy writers, even while earning blurbs from Coetzee - perhaps partly because of this. With this, her eighth book, she reminds us of the considerable skill she has yet to fully tap into, like the sea, ‘home, or almost home.’ "
 
-- Open the Magazine

 
"Her prose has an exquisite awareness."
 
- India Today


"Hariharan’s writing in spare, punctuated with passages of brilliant clarity and compassion."

- Verve


"She can do magic… Hariharan's greatest gift is the ability to weave story, poetry and magic into the simplest of sentences, so that reading her is an effortless pleasure."

- India Today