Piya Roy, an American cetologist of Bengali descent, arrives in the Sundarbans to survey rare Irrawaddy dolphins. On a train from Calcutta she meets Kanai Dutt, a confident Delhi businessman and translator heading to the tide country to read a notebook left by his late uncle Nirmal, a schoolteacher and disillusioned Marxist.
Unable to speak Bengali, Piya comes to depend on Fokir, an illiterate fisherman who knows the rivers by instinct, and an unspoken bond forms between them that unsettles Kanai. Nirmal's notebook, woven through the present-day story, recounts the 1979 events on Morichjhapi island, where refugees from Bangladesh tried to settle and were driven off by the state.
The novel is part adventure, part ecological meditation on a landscape where islands appear and vanish and tigers kill villagers every year. Ghosh asks whose lives count when conservation and human survival collide, and he gives the mangrove forest itself the presence of a character.
Book details
| Author | Amitav Ghosh |
|---|---|
| First published | 2004 |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | Literary fiction |
| Type | Fiction |
| Pages (approx.) | 333 |
| Setting | The Sundarbans and Lusibari island, West Bengal, 1979 and early 2000s |
Themes
- Ecology and conservation
- Refugees
- Language and translation
- Class
- Nature's power
Who should read it
Readers drawn to nature writing and novels where landscape and politics are inseparable.