Three lives collide on an island off India: “An engrossing tale of caste and culture… introduces readers to a little-known world.”—Entertainment Weekly
 
Off the easternmost coast of India, in the Bay of Bengal, lies the immense labyrinth of tiny islands known as the Sundarbans. For settlers here, life is extremely precarious. Attacks by tigers are common. Unrest and eviction are constant threats....

"The final novel in the bestselling Ibis Trilogy. It is 1839 and China has embargoed the trade of opium, yet too much is at stake in the lucrative business and the British Foreign Secretary has ordered the colonial government in India to assemble an expeditionary force for an attack to reinstate the trade. Among those consigned is Kesri Singh, a soldier in the army of the East India Company. He makes his way eastward on the Hind, a transport ship...

On a journey across the Indian Ocean, the passengers of the enormous ship, The Ibis, bond together like family. Intent on fighting China's nineteenth-century Opium Wars, this hodgepodge group of passengers travel together from the high seas to the poppy fields of the Ganges, and into the backstreets of exotic Canton.

"Opening in Calcutta in the 1960's. Amitav Ghosh's radiant second novel follows two families - one English, one Bengali as their lives intertwine in 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 decades of violence in Bengal, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives."--Page [4] of cover.

Novelist and journalist Ghosh has offered firsthand accounts of pivotal world events over the past twenty years. He is an essential voice in forums like The Nation, the New York Times, the New Republic, Granta, and The New Yorker. This book brings together the finest of these pieces for the first time--including many never before published in the U.S.--in a compelling chronicle of the turmoil of our times. In his travels he has walked amid the devastation...

Overview: Once upon a time an Indian writer named Amitav Ghosh set out to find an Indian slave, name unknown, who some seven hundred years before had traveled to the Middle East. The journey took him to a small village in Egypt, where medieval customs coexist with twentieth-century desires and discontents. But even as Ghosh sought to re-create the life of his Indian predecessor, he found himself immersed in those of his modern Egyptian neighbors....

"The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis frames climate change and the Anthropocene as the culmination of a history that begins with the discovery of the New World and of the sea route to the Indian Ocean. Ghosh makes the case that the political dynamics of climate change today are rooted in the centuries-old geopolitical order that was constructed by Western colonialism. This argument is set within a broader narrative about human entanglements...