Ghost-Eye
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Named a most anticipated book of 2026 by Esquire | Literary Hub
"Ghost-Eye is a marvel that will ignite a reader's sense of wonder—a masterful novel, at once simple and capacious." —Rabih Alameddine, National Book Award–winning author of The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)
Past and present collide in a novel about a girl who might just be a "case of the reincarnation type."
Varsha Gupta wants fish for lunch. Her family is shocked; the three-year-old has never tasted fish in her life. The Guptas are strict vegetarians and don’t allow it inside their Calcutta mansion. But Varsha claims she can remember another life, in a mud house by a river where she caught and cooked fish with a different mother.
Perplexed, the Guptas turn to Dr. Shoma Bose, a psychologist who has been investigating what are known as "cases of the reincarnation type" for years. But her understanding of the world is changed forever by Varsha's revelations.
Half a century later, Varsha's case file catches the attention of a group of environmental activists, and Shoma's nephew Dinu is drawn inexorably into their plans. As Dinu finds himself caught up in the search for Varsha, buried memories of his own past begin to surface.
Traveling between late 1960s Calcutta and present-day Brooklyn, Amitav Ghosh's Ghost-Eye is an urgent and expansive novel from one of our greatest living storytellers, about family, fate, and our fragile planet.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A layered mystery unfolds when a three-year-old girl seems to know things she couldn’t possibly have learned—at least in this life. From the moment Varsha’s obsession with fish throws her vegetarian family into confusion, novelist Amitav Ghosh spins an ambitious blend of magical realism, political history, and spiritual mystery stretching from late-1960s Calcutta into Brooklyn in the modern day. The story moves between timelines and generations as psychiatrists, activists, skeptics, and believers all try to make sense of strange memories, supernatural intuition, and humanity’s increasingly fragile relationship with the natural world. Sometimes it reads like a reincarnation mystery, other times it feels like a meditation on displacement and climate collapse. Its most compelling moments come from the vivid sense of place, especially its evocation of rivers, forests, animals, and landscapes that seem alive with memory and warning. Ghost-Eye is a novel you need to meet on its own terms, but it’s a wonderfully strange and thought-provoking ride.
