The Hungry Tide
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- €7.49
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- €7.49
Publisher Description
A profound and absorbing saga from the Internationally Bestselling and Man Booker Prize shortlisted author
'Amitav Ghosh is such a fascinating and seductive writer… I cannot think of another contemporary writer with whom it would be this thrilling to go so far, so fast' The Times
January 2001: A small ship, led by wealthy Scotsman Daniel Hamilton, arrives in the Sundarbans, a vast archipelago of islands in the mythical river Ganges, a half-drowned land where the waters of the Himalayas merge with the incoming tides of the sea.
In the Sundarbans the tides reach more than 100 miles inland, and every day thousands of hectares of forest disappear only to re-emerge hours later. Dense as the mangrove forests are, from Hamilton’s point of view, it is only a little less barren than a desert.
The eccentric Scotsman and the scientists on board the ship disembark to study this little-known environment, and to trace the journeys of the descendants of this society. Their goal? To create a utopian society, of all races and religions, and conquer the might of the Sundarbans.
Reviews
'An exceptional writer.' Peter Matthieson
‘A novelist of dazzling ingenuity' San Francisco Chronicle
'A distinctive voice, polished and profound' Times Literary Supplement
'An absorbing story of a world in transition, brought to life through characters who love and suffer with equal intensity.' JM Coetzee
'Ghosh is one of the most sympathetic post-colonial voices to be heard today. He looks at love and loyalty, and examines the question of Empire and responsibility, of tradition and modernity.’ Ahdaf Souief
'Ghosh has established himself as one of the finest prose writers of his generation of Indians writing in English' Financial Times
'Amitav Ghosh is such a fascinating and seductive writer…a deeply serious writer, sure of his human and historical insights and confident in his ability to communicate them. I cannot think of another contemporary writer with whom it would be this thrilling to go so far, so fast' The Times
About the author
The author was born in Calcutta and grew up in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and northern India. Educated in India and Britain, he now lives in New York.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A starred review indicates a book of outstanding quality. A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of unusual commercial interest that hasn't received a starred review.THE HUNGRY TIDEAmitav Ghosh. Houghton Mifflin, $25 (352p) One doesn't so much read Ghosh's masterful fifth novel as inhabit his characters and the alluring if treacherous Sundarban archipelago, "the ragged fringe of sari," where it is set. The author's nuanced descriptions of the moods and microenvironments of the islands serve as a lush backdrop for an intricate narrative that moves fluidly between past and present. Hoping to make her mark in the cetological world, Piyali Roy, an Indian-American marine biologist, travels across the Sundarbans in search of the once plentiful Irrawaddy dolphin. Piyali befriends both an illiterate fisherman, Fokir, who leads her to a dolphin-rich river enclave, and a successful interpreter, Kanai Dutt, who has arrived in the region from New Delhi to retrieve his deceased uncle Nirmal's journal. Through Nirmal, a Rilke-quoting former school headmaster and erstwhile revolutionary, Ghosh recounts the history of the islands with an unsentimental melancholy. Nirmal's account of the true story of the 1979 siege of Morichjhapi, in which destitute squatters were brutally evicted by the Indian government in order to preserve a wildlife sanctuary, poignantly displays the author's gift for traversing the fiction/nonfiction boundary. Ghosh (The Glass Palace, etc.), however, is uninterested in setting up simple good/evil binaries and instead weds the issues of love, language and land to the unfolding relationships among Piyali, Fokir and Kanai. The philosophical and moral implications of their actions remain simmering just below the surface. The climactic ending, in which a cyclone threatens the inhabitants of the Sundarbans, underscores Nirmal's observation that "nothing escapes the maw of the tides."
