Amitav Ghosh

In an Antique Land is a subversive history in the guise of a traveller's tale. When the author stumbles across a slave narrative in the margins of an ancient text, his curiosity is piqued. What follows is a ten year search, which brings author and slave together across 800 hundred years of colonial history. Bursting with anecdote and exuberant detail, it offers a magical, intimate biography of the private life of a country, Egypt, from the Crusades to Operation Desert Storm.

A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book for 2011 The Ibis, loaded to its gunwales with a cargo of indentured servants, is in the grip of a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal; among the dozens flailing for survival are Neel, the pampered raja who has been convicted of embezzlement; Paulette, the French orphan masquerading as a deck-hand; and Deeti, the widowed poppy grower fleeing her homeland with her lover, Kalua. The storm also threatens the clipper ship Anahita, groaning with the largest consignment of opium ever to leave India for Canton. And the Redruth, a nursery ship, carries Frederick "Fitcher" Penrose, a horticulturist determined to track down the priceless treasures of China that are hidden in plain sight: its plants that have the power to heal, or beautify, or intoxicate. All will converge in Canton's Fanqui-town, or Foreign Enclave: a tumultuous world unto itself where civilizations clash and sometimes fuse. It is a powder keg awaiting a spark to ignite the Opium Wars. Spectacular coincidences, startling reversals of fortune, and tender love stories abound. But this is much more than an irresistible page-turner. The blind quest for money, the primacy of the drug trade, the concealment of base impulses behind the rhetoric of freedom: in River of Smoke the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries converge, and the result is a consuming historical novel with powerful contemporary resonance. Critics praised Sea of Poppies for its vibrant storytelling, antic humor, and rich narrative scope; now Amitav Ghosh continues the epic that has charmed and compelled readers all over the globe.

A saga of flight and pursuit, this novel chronicles the adventures of Alu, a young weaver who is wrongly suspected of being a terrorist. Chased from Bengal to Bombay and on through the Persian Gulf to North Africa by a bird-watching police inspector, Alu encounters along the way a cast of characters as various and as colourful as the epithets with which the author adorns them. The reader is drawn into their lives by incidents tender and outrageous and all compellingly told. Ghosh is as natural a weaver of words as Alu is of cloth, deftly interlacing humour and wisdom to produce a narrative tapestry of surpassing beauty.

In this extraordinary novel, Amitav Ghosh navigates through time and genres to present a unique tale. Beginning at an unspecified time in the future and ranging back to the late nineteenth century, the reader follows the adventures of the enigmatic L. Murugan. An authority on the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sir Ronald Ross, who solved the malaria puzzle in Calcutta in 1898, Murugan is in search of the elusive 'Calcutta Chromosome'. With its astonishing range of characters, advanced computer science, religious cults and wonderful portraits of Victorian and contemporary India, The Calcutta Chromosome expands the scope of the novel as we know it, as Amitav Ghosh takes on the avatar of a science thriller writer.

A wide-eyed boy growing up in suburban Calcutta in the 1960s experiences the world through the eyes of others - an intoxicating older cousin, a grandmother who weaves stories from the past and a family in London whose lives are intertwined with his. When a seemingly random act of violence threatens his vision of the world, he begins piecing together events for himself, and in the process unravels secrets with devastating consequences. Set in Calcutta and London and spanning generations from the outbreak of the Second World War to the late twentieth century, The Shadow Lines is a haunting novel from one of the world's greatest writers.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008'Sea of Poppies boasts a varied collection of characters to love and hate, and provides wonderfully detailed descriptions . . . utterly involving and piles on tension until the very last page' Sunday TimesAt the heart of this epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars, is an old slaving-ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, its crew a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed villager, from an evangelical English opium trader to a mulatto American freedman. As their old family ties are washed away they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races and generations. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of China. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, which makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive - a masterpiece from one of the world's finest novelists.

A collection of essays by the best-selling novelist and journalist provides eyewitness accounts and reflections on some of the most important and turbulent events of the past thirty years, including the catastrophic impact of the tsunami on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the tragedy of September 11th, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and more. Reprint.

The author of The Glass Palace presents a new novel of life in modern India, chronicling the interwoven journey of an American marine biologist and a Delhi businessman who travel to the remote Sundarban islands. Reader's Guide available. Reprint.

The International Bestseller from the Man Booker Prize shortlisted author'An absorbing story of a world in transition' JM Coetzee'A Doctor Zhivago for the Far East' The Independent

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

Fom the author of The Glass Palace, the widely-acclaimed bestseller. The Hungry Tide is a rich, exotic saga set in Calcutta and in the vast archipelago of islands in the Bay of Bengal.

Amitav Ghosh's extraordinary novel makes a claim on literary turf held by Gabriel Garc a M rquez and Salman Rushdie. In a vivid and magical story, The Circle of Reason traces the misadventures of Alu, a young master weaver in a small Bengali village who is falsely accused of terrorism. Alu flees his home, traveling through Bombay to the Persian Gulf to North Africa with a bird-watching policeman in pursuit.

"A stunning novel" following two families -- one British, one Bengali -- from the New York Times best-selling 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." -- New York Times Book Review

Faszinierende Familiensaga und dramatische Liebesgeschichte in einem, das ist der neue Roman von Amitav Gosh. "Der Doktor Schiwago des Fernen Osten" (INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY) fand mit seinem farbenprächtigen Epos über Liebe und Krieg in einem exotischen Land auf der ganzen Welt begeisterte Leser und war auch bei den Kritikern ein Riesenerfolg. Dieser erste große Roman über das geheimnisumwitterte Birma erzählt die Geschichte des jungen Rajkumar, der in einer Imbissbude auf dem Markt von Mandalay 1885 Zeuge des Einmarsches der britischen Truppen wird. Entsetzt beobachtet er die Plünderung des Glaspalastes und muss mit ansehen, wie die Königsfamilie ins Exil gejagt wird. Im Gefolge sieht er die Dienerin Dolly und ist von ihrer Schönheit so bezaubert, dass er ihr Gesicht nie mehr vergisst ...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND LOS ANGELES TIMES "A rich, layered epic that probes the meaning of identity and homeland-- a literary territory that is as resonant now, in our globalized culture, as it was when the sun never set on the British Empire."--Los Angeles Times Book Review Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love will shape his life. He cannot forget her, and years later, as a rich man, he goes in search of her. The struggles that have made Burma, India, and Malaya the places they are today are illuminated in this wonderful novel by the writer Chitra Divakaruni calls "a master storyteller." Praise for The Glass Palace "An absorbing story of a world in transition, brought to life through characters who love and suffer with equal intensity."--J. M. Coetzee"There is no denying Ghosh's command of culture and history. . . . He] proves a writer of supreme skill and intelligence."--The Atlantic Monthly"I will never forget the young and old Rajkumar, Dolly, the Princesses, the forests of teak, the wealth that made families and wars. A wonderful novel. An incredible story."--Grace Paley"A novelist of dazzling ingenuity."--San Francisco Chronicle

Rajkumar, in truly Dickensian style, succeeds at making a fortune from his logging business, but never forgets Dolly, the girl he saw accompanying the exiled Burmese royal family.

From Victorian lndia to near-future New York, The Calcutta Chromosome takes readers on a wondrous journey through time as a computer programmer trapped in a mind-numbing job hits upon a curious item that will forever change his life. When Antar discovers the battered I. D. card of a long-lost acquaintance, he is suddenly drawn into a spellbinding adventure across centuries and around the globe, into the strange life of L. Murugan, a man obsessed with the medical history of malaria, and into a magnificently complex world where conspiracy hangs in the air like mosquitoes on a summer night.

Once upon a time, an Indian writer named Amitav Ghosh set out as 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. Combining shrewd observations with painstaking historical research, Ghosh serves up skeptics and holy men, merchants and sorcerers. Some of these figures are real, some only imagine, but all emerge as vividly as the characters in a great novel. In an Antique Land is an inspired work that transcends genres as deftly as it does eras, weaving an entrancing and intoxicating spell.