'This shape-shifting, time-stitching novel grants us special kinds of double-vision: across eras and between species. Under its spell, Amitav Ghosh helps us begin to live multiple lives - to become aware of the porosity and mystery of being, rather than of its fortifications and frontiers' Robert Macfarlane, author of Is a River Alive?
Calcutta, September 1969
Varsha Gupta wants fish for her lunch. Her family can't understand it; 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, 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 psychiatrist 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 therapeutic case file catches the attention of a group of environmental activists, and Shoma's nephew Dinu is drawn inexorably into their plans. And as Dinu finds himself caught up in the search for Varsha, buried memories of his own past begin to surface.
Travelling between late-sixties Calcutta and present-day Brooklyn, Ghost-Eye is an urgent and expansive novel about family, fate and our fragile planet.
'Amitav Ghosh's intellectual panache and serene mastery of form make him one of the last great practitioners of the novel of ideas. Captivating' Pankaj Mishra
Genre: Literary Fiction
Calcutta, September 1969
Varsha Gupta wants fish for her lunch. Her family can't understand it; 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, 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 psychiatrist 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 therapeutic case file catches the attention of a group of environmental activists, and Shoma's nephew Dinu is drawn inexorably into their plans. And as Dinu finds himself caught up in the search for Varsha, buried memories of his own past begin to surface.
Travelling between late-sixties Calcutta and present-day Brooklyn, Ghost-Eye is an urgent and expansive novel about family, fate and our fragile planet.
'Amitav Ghosh's intellectual panache and serene mastery of form make him one of the last great practitioners of the novel of ideas. Captivating' Pankaj Mishra
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"Ghost-Eye is a marvel that will ignite a reader's sense of wonder-a masterful novel, at once simple and capacious. Ghosh is one of our finest writers." - Rabih Alameddine
"Ghost-Eye is a brilliant return to Ghosh's speculative vein, haunting and liberating as it confronts hierarchies ancient and modern." - Siddhartha Deb
"Ghost-Eye is a well-executed story by one of the greatest novelists of our time. I was most excited to read it." - Nuruddin Farah
"Amitav Ghosh's intellectual panache and serene mastery of form make him one of the last great practitioners of the novel of ideas. Ghost-Eye is the most captivating expression yet of an imagination unfettered by the protocols of the liberal-humanist novel: a novel that explores the very real, if still oddly underexplored, world of the spirit that hundreds of millions of people inhabit simultaneously with its material counterpart." - Pankaj Mishra
"Amitav Ghosh has done more than any novelist to reimagine the role of fiction in our age of environmental emergency. In Ghost-Eye, he draws the reader from the world we know into a shadow realm of reincarnation and levitation, of talking trees and whispering spirits. Mournful and exhilarating, Ghost-Eye insists that, as its narrator says, 'In order to save the world, we have to remind ourselves of the old ways." - Nathaniel Rich
"Ghost-Eye is a brilliant return to Ghosh's speculative vein, haunting and liberating as it confronts hierarchies ancient and modern." - Siddhartha Deb
"Ghost-Eye is a well-executed story by one of the greatest novelists of our time. I was most excited to read it." - Nuruddin Farah
"Amitav Ghosh's intellectual panache and serene mastery of form make him one of the last great practitioners of the novel of ideas. Ghost-Eye is the most captivating expression yet of an imagination unfettered by the protocols of the liberal-humanist novel: a novel that explores the very real, if still oddly underexplored, world of the spirit that hundreds of millions of people inhabit simultaneously with its material counterpart." - Pankaj Mishra
"Amitav Ghosh has done more than any novelist to reimagine the role of fiction in our age of environmental emergency. In Ghost-Eye, he draws the reader from the world we know into a shadow realm of reincarnation and levitation, of talking trees and whispering spirits. Mournful and exhilarating, Ghost-Eye insists that, as its narrator says, 'In order to save the world, we have to remind ourselves of the old ways." - Nathaniel Rich
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