2 reviews for The Hungry Tide
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The Hungry Tide
by Amitav Ghosh
Description:
Off the easternmost corner of India, in the Bay of Bengal, lies the immense labyrinth of tiny islands known as the Sundarbans, where settlers live in fear of drowning tides and man-eating tigers. Piya Roy, a young American marine biologist of Indian descent, arrives in this lush, treacherous landscape in search of a rare species of river dolphin and enlists the aid of a local fisherman and a translator. Together the three of them launch into the elaborate backwaters, drawn unawares into the powerful political undercurrents of this isolated corner of the world that exact a personal toll as fierce as the tides.
About The Author
Amitav Ghosh (born 11 July 1956) is an Indian-American author best known for his work in English fiction.Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta on 11 July 1956 to a Bengali Hindu family, to Lieutenant Colonel Shailendra Chandra Ghosh, a retired officer of the pre-independence Indian Army. His first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi.
Ghosh lives in New York with his wife, Deborah Baker, author of the Laura Riding biography In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (1993) and a senior editor at Little, Brown and Company. They have two adult children, Lila and Nayan, who both work in the finance industry in New York. He has been a fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum. In 1999, Ghosh joined the faculty at Queens College, City University of New York, as Distinguished Professor in Comparative literature. He has also been a visiting professor at the English department of Harvard University since 2005. Ghosh subsequently returned to India began working on the Ibis trilogy which includes Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire (published May 2015).
He was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian government in 2007. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2015 Ghosh was named a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow.
Skryf Review
Amitav Ghosh’s latest masterpiece, the Hungry Tide, will sweep you off your feet, and into the precarious waters of the Sundarbans.In the typical Ghosh style, the narrative moves fluidly between past and present. You will be transported into the mindset of the superstitious yet brave folk, who have adapted themselves to the constant ebb and flow of the tide and are living in continuous fear of the Bengal tigers. The tide begins to turn with the advent of two seekers from the outside world – Piyali Roy, an Indian-American marine biologist in search of the Irrawaddy dolphins and Kanai Dutt, an urbane translator from New Delhi who’s there to retrieve his deceased uncle Nirmal’s journal. Their lives become intertwined particularly with Fokir, an illiterate but proud fisherman, who has the “rivers in his heart.” As the narrative progresses, they are forced to respect nature in order to survive, and to communicate with people who differ not only in language but also in equations of existence. It is a story of love, revolution, brutal history and the place of man within the treacheries of nature. It seems to underscore Nirmal’s observation that “nothing escapes the maw of the tides.”
Dr Neerja Shah
great book!