Robbie Clipper Sethi

In this debut collection of bittersweet, interconnected stories, Sethi shows off her versatility.

Publishers Weekly

Sethi, married herself to an Indian Sikh, brings to these tales of Anglo-Indian alliances a perceptive but always clear-eyed sympathy: East is East and West is West, but neither has the lock on cultural superiority. . . . A subtle take on a difficult subject, from a newcoming worthy to join that small, elect band who record the trails and occasional triumphs of love across the culture lines.

Kirkus

She goes so deeply into the Indian psyche, her understanding of the culture and customs is so profound that she might as well be Indian herself. The Bride Wore Red is a wise and witty book, but because of the empathy the author feels with her subject, the wit, wherever it occurs, is tempered with compassion.

Victor Rangel-Ribiero, author of Tivolem, for The Literary Review

Sethi’s candid, winsome tales come as a tonic and confirm a truth all sane people understand about cultural differences . . . The coward denigrates ‘foreigners’ and opponents and sometimes kills them. . . The ordinary person perhaps fears foreigners, but conducts himself with tolerance and respect. . . published in the Philadelphia inquirer)
The hero comes up with a ring, or accepts one.

Carlin Romano, On Books (syndicated column first appearing in the Philadelphia Inquirer

Sethi is to be praised for writing so many stories on essentially the same topic without once seeming repetitive. Quite the contrary; revisiting these conflicts with warmth and wit, she burnishes and illuminates a deserving manuscript. Each tale heightens the message that to be shunned is difficult, but to be accepted may be harder still.

Washington Post

What is comedy on one side is tragedy on the other. Sethi’s book becomes a warm and sympathetic view of the perils and rewards of such marriage and captivating reading.

Denver Post

The Bride Wore Red

Click here to see the Washington Post's publication of the first chapter of The Bride Wore Red.

The Bride Wore Red, hard cover. A Rider student, not even one of mine, looked at it and asked me if I was from Texas!

This is the 5th chapter of The Bride Wore Red in more or less the form in which it appears in the book. You can find a longer version in the August, 1991 issue of Atlantic Monthly. I kind of like that one better. But it had to be edited for the novel. (53 KB)

The Bride Wore Red, paper. I am eternally grateful to Picador USA for this sexy and very appropriate cover!

Selected Works

Fiction

Fifty-Fifty

This is my most recently published novel.

The Bride Wore Red

Tales of a Cross-Cultural Family. This is my first published novel. It made me a Barnes and Noble Great New Writer for the summer, 1996.

Dry Land Sailors

This is a novel about a group of high school graduates, between high school and college in 1969, who call up the dead and deal with the consequences.

The Music of the Spheres

This is a novel about Patricia Paula Sikorski who becomes St. Cecilia of a very prolific rock and roll group, The Spheres in the seventies, eighties, and nineties.

Poetry

Heat

This is one of the poems written for Harry Naar's pen and ink drawings.

Sea Legs

This is one of the two poems written for artist Harry Naar's pen and ink drawings

Quick Links

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