The Hungry Tide: A Novel

Amitav Ghosh

Mar 2014 · Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

About this ebook

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. At any moment, tidal floods may rise and surge over the land, leaving devastation in their wake.
 
In this place of vengeful beauty, the lives of three people collide. Piya Roy is a marine biologist, of Indian descent but stubbornly American, in search of a rare, endangered river dolphin. Her journey begins with a disaster when she is thrown from a boat into crocodile-infested waters. Rescue comes in the form of a young, illiterate fisherman, Fokir. Although they have no language between them, they are powerfully drawn to each other, sharing an uncanny instinct for the ways of the sea.
 
Piya engages Fokir to help with her research and finds a translator in Kanai Dutt, a businessman from Delhi whose idealistic aunt and uncle are longtime settlers in the Sundarbans. As the three launch into the elaborate backwaters, they are drawn unawares into the hidden undercurrents of this isolated world, where political turmoil exacts a personal toll as powerful as the ravaging tide.
 
From the national bestselling author of Gun Island, The Hungry Tide was a winner of the Crossword Book Prize and a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize.
 
“A great swirl of political, social, and environmental issues, presented through a story that’s full of romance, suspense, and poetry.”—The Washington Post
 
“Masterful.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Ratings and reviews

like always Mr.Ghosh weaves an interesting story rich in history, culture and of couse science (in this case, cetology). At times i think Mr.Ghosh is trying a little too hard to tell a love story between characters of disparate backgrounds while also trying to make them metaphors for our cognitive dissonance between environmental protection and environmental exploitation for our survival.

About the author

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and raised and educated in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Egypt, India, and the United Kingdom, where he received his PhD in social anthropology from Oxford. Acclaimed for fiction, travel writing, and journalism, his books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land, and Dancing in Cambodia. Ghosh has won France’s Prix Medici Etranger, India’s prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Pushcart Prize. He now divides his time between Harvard University, where he is a visiting professor, and his homes in India and Brooklyn, New York.