BookBrowse Reviews The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh

BookBrowse:

Set on the East Coast of India. Novel

Amitav Ghosh, the author of 4 previous novels including The Glass Palace, spent four years researching this book, including living in a small village in the Sundarbans for some weeks. It's a gorgeous book that works on a number of levels - part love story, part political history and part meticulously researched environmental study. As Publishers Weekly puts it, "One doesn't so much read Ghosh's masterful fifth novel as inhabit his characters and the alluring if treacherous Sundarban archipelago."

The starting point for The Hungry Tide was a piece of Ghosh's family history - a century ago a wealthy Scot attempted to set up a Marxist-style utopia on one of the flood-plagued islands. Ghosh's uncle was a teacher and manager in the project.

The Sundarbans area includes the delta of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers on the Bay of Bengal, some of which is in India but mostly in Bangladesh. The area, which has been designated a World Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserve, is intersected by a complex network of tidal waterways, mudflats and small islands of salt-tolerant mangrove forests, with a wide variety of native fauna including 260 bird species, Bengal tigers, estuarine crocodiles and Indian pythons, and about 4 million humans.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in May 2005, and has been updated for the June 2006 edition. Click here to go to this issue.