Showing results by author "Amitav Ghosh" in All Categories

Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability - at the level of literature, history, and politics - to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.

In September 1838 a storm blows up on the Indian Ocean and the Ibis, a ship carrying a consignment of convicts and indentured laborers from Calcutta to Mauritius, is caught up in the whirlwind. When the seas settle, five men have disappeared - two lascars, two convicts and one of the passengers. Did the same storm upend the fortunes of those aboard the Anahita, an opium carrier heading towards Canton?

Gun Island is a beautifully realised novel which effortlessly spans space and time. It is the story of a world on the brink, of increasing displacement and unstoppable transition. But it is also a story of hope, of a man whose faith in the world and the future is restored by two remarkable women.

The final book in the best-selling Ibis trilogy from the author of Booker-shortlisted Sea of Poppies. It is 1839, and tension has been rapidly mounting between China and British India following the crackdown on opium smuggling by Beijing. With no resolution in sight, the colonial government declares war. One of the vessels requisitioned for the attack, the Hind, travels eastward from Bengal to China, sailing into the midst of the First Opium War.

Rajkumar is only another boy, helping on a market stall in the dusty square outside the royal palace, when the British force the Burmese King, Queen and all the Court into exile. He is rescued by the far-seeing Chinese merchant, and with him builds up a logging business in upper Burma. But haunted by his vision of the Royal Family, he journeys to the obscure town in India where they have been exiled.

LONGLISTED FOR THE CUNDHILL HISTORY PRIZE 'An acerbic, compelling and always accessible account of how opium corrupted the world' TLS 'The writing is sublime, the research thorough, the eye for story superb' Sunday Telegraph 'A history of the opium poppy, which probes how the drug trade has...

January 2001: A small ship, led by wealthy Scotsman Daniel Hamilton, arrives in the Sundarbans, a vast archipelago of islands in the mythical river Ganges, a half-drowned land where the waters of the Himalayas merge with the incoming tides of the sea.

The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation - of both human life and the natural environment - and the origin of our contemporary climate crisis. Tracing the threats to our future to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean, The Nutmeg's Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. The story of the nutmeg becomes a parable revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials.

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.

'This shape-shifting, time-stitching novel grants us special kinds of double-vision: across eras and between species. Under its spell, Amitav Ghosh helps us begin to live multiple lives - to become aware of the porosity and mystery of being, rather than of its fortifications and frontiers'...

Wild Fictions brings together Amitav Ghosh's extraordinary writing on the subjects that have obsessed him over the last twenty-five years: literature and language; climate change and the environment; human lives, travel, and discoveries. The spaces that we inhabit, and the way in which we occupy them, is a constant thread throughout this striking and expansive collection.

A dealer of rare books, Deen is used to a quiet life spent indoors, but as his once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is forced to set out on an extraordinary journey; one that takes him from India to Los Angeles and Venice via a tangled route through the memories and experiences of those he meets along the way.

Jungle Nama is a beautiful verse adaptation of a legend from the Sundarbans, the world's largest mangrove forest. It tells the story of the avaricious rich merchant Dhona, the poor lad Dukhey and his mother; it is also the story of Dokkhin Rai, a mighty spirit who appears to humans as a tiger, of Bon Bibi, the benign goddess of the forest, and her warrior brother, Shah Jongoli.

Una vecchia nave negriera trasformata in mercantile, l'Ibis, raggiunge nel 1838 la foce del Gange per dedicarsi a uno dei traffici illeciti più redditizi dell'Impero britannico, il commercio di «delinquenti e stupefacenti», cioè di coolie e oppio. A mano a mano che le difficoltà imposte alla traversata dall'impetuoso Oceano Indiano mettono a dura prova i vecchi legami, tutti sulla Ibis, ciurma e passeggeri, iniziano a sentirsi «fratelli di navigazione», uniti da una singolare empatia che azzera le distanze geografiche, le caste e le generazioni.

Nel settembre del 1838 una tempesta si abbatte sull'Oceano Indiano e la Ibis, la goletta partita da Calcutta con un carico di galeotti diretta a Mauritius, viene coinvolta nel vortice. Quando il mare si calma, cinque uomini mancano all'appello: due lascari e tre coolie sono riusciti a fuggire su una scialuppa. Seconda tappa di una grandiosa epopea storica, Il fiume dell'oppio segue i suoi personaggi fino ai porti affollati della Cina.

A dealer of rare books, Deen is used to a quiet life spent indoors, but as his once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is forced to set out on an extraordinary journey; one that takes him from India to Los Angeles and Venice via a tangled route through the memories and experiences of those he meets along the way.

A dealer of rare books, Deen is used to a quiet life spent indoors, but as his once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is forced to set out on an extraordinary journey; one that takes him from India to Los Angeles and Venice via a tangled route through the memories and experiences of those he meets along the way.

È il 1840 e la tensione tra la Cina e l'India britannica cresce a dismisura in seguito alla repressione del contrabbando di oppio da parte di Pechino. L'oppio è troppo importante per le casse della regina, e troppo ghiotte sono le opportunità di profitto in quel fazzoletto di mondo per non scatenare una guerra contro il Celeste Impero. Sullo sfondo di queste tensioni, i protagonisti che abbiamo incontrato a bordo della Ibis si incontrano di nuovo, questa volta tra Canton e Hong Kong.

Before the 18th century, every single nutmeg in the world originated around a group of small volcanic islands east of Java, known as the Banda Islands. As the nutmeg made its way across the known world, they became immensely valuable—in 16th-century Europe, just a handful could buy a house. It was not long before European traders became conquerors, and the indigenous Bandanese communities—and the islands themselves—would pay a high price for access to this precious commodity.

El nuevo libro de Amitav Ghosh, una poderosa obra de historia, ensayo, testimonio y polémica, remonta nuestra crisis planetaria contemporánea al descubrimiento del Nuevo Mundo y la ruta marítima hacia el Océano Índico. ‘La maldición de la nuez moscada’ sostiene que la dinámica del cambio climático actual hunde sus raíces en un orden geopolítico secular construido por el colonialismo occidental.