The Shadow Lines
A Novel
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4.1 • 7 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"A stunning novel" following two families—one British, one Bengali—from the New York Times–bestselling author of Sea of Poppies (The New Republic).
Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Amitav Ghosh's radiant second novel follows an English family and a Bengali family as their lives intertwine across the generations in both tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, from the outbreak of World War II to the late twentieth century, through years of Bengali partition and violence—observing the ways in which political events invade private lives—in an "ambitious, funny, poignant" saga (A. K. Ramanujan).
"Amusing, sad, wise, and truly international in scope." —The New York Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With Proustian precision, the narrator of Ghosh's second novel (after The Circle of Reason ) recalls the people and events that dominated his childhood in Calcutta in the '60s, and later in London, when those people, and the lasting influence of the events, come together in a circle of sorrow. The narrator focuses on two families known to each other since the time of the Raj: his own, in particular his cousin Ila and her young uncle Tridib, and the Prices, including the children May and Nick. Meticulously observant, he describes his school days, punctuated by visits with Tridib (whose conversation, especially about his visits with the Prices, the boy will remember almost word for word) or from Ila's family, who lived mostly abroad because her father was a diplomat. While the mystery at the tale's heart concerns Tridib's fate in the city of Dhaka during the summer of Bangladesh's Partition, in 1964, the effects of that crucial time--on the narrator, on May--do not unfold until nearly 20 years later. Such delayed understanding is the fuel that powers Ghosh's quiet, forceful writing, in which detail and memory are shown to shape our lives as effectively as events of global importance. Examining connectedness and separation, the author uses the fate of nations to offer observations about a profoundly human condition.
