The Hungry Tide

Presents a novel of life in modern India, chronicling the interwoven journey of an American marine biologist and a Delhi businessman who travel to the remote Sundarban islands.

"One doesn't so much read Ghosh's masterful fifth novel as inhabit his characters and the alluring if treacherous Sundarban archipelago...a lush backdrop for an intricate narrative." Publishers Weekly, Starred

"...lovingly and fanatically and even beautifully about a place...[Ghosh] has created a large, colorful story and a voluptuous world into which we gratefully disappear." O, The Oprah Magazine

"The Hungry Tide is a great swirl of political, social, and environmental issures, presented through a story that's full of romance, suspense, and poetry." The Washington Post

"Ghosh not only infuses great energy and spirit into an engrossing tale of caste and culture, he deftly introduces readers to a little-known world and makes it familiar." (Editor's Choice) Entertainment Weekly

"Amitav Ghosh tops my list of authors I wish readers everywhere would get to know better." Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer

"A fascinating tapestry." Kirkus Reviews

Autorentext
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 Ph.D. 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.

Klappentext

"A sprawling, stormy, magnificent novel of India untamed." --O: The Oprah Magazine "A certifiable page-turner."--Boston Globe From Amitav Ghosh, award-winning and international bestselling author of the Ibis Trilogy, comes a contemporary story of adventure and unlikely love, identity, and history, set in one of the most fascinating regions of the world. A Washington Post Book World, San Francisco Chronicle, and Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year - A Finalist for the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction Life is harsh in the Sundarbans, the treacherous islands in the Bay of Bengal where isolated inhabitants live in fear of drowning tides and man-eating tigers. Piya Roy is a young marine biologist, of Indian descent but stubbornly American, who has come here in search of a rare, endangered river dolphin. She enlists the aid of a local fisherman and a translator, and soon their fates on the waterways will be determined by the forces of nature and human folly.

Zusammenfassung

"A sprawling, stormy, magnificent novel of India untamed." —O: The Oprah Magazine

"A certifiable page-turner."—Boston Globe

From Amitav Ghosh, award-winning and international bestselling author of the Ibis Trilogy, comes a contemporary story of adventure and unlikely love, identity, and history, set in one of the most fascinating regions of the world.

A Washington Post Book World, San Francisco Chronicle, and Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year • A Finalist for the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction

Life is harsh in the Sundarbans, the treacherous islands in the Bay of Bengal where isolated inhabitants live in fear of drowning tides and man-eating tigers. Piya Roy is a young marine biologist, of Indian descent but stubbornly American, who has come here in search of a rare, endangered river dolphin. She enlists the aid of a local fisherman and a translator, and soon their fates on the waterways will be determined by the forces of nature and human folly.

Leseprobe
THE TIDE COUNTRY

Kanai spotted her the moment he stepped onto the crowded platform: he was deceived neither by her close-cropped black hair nor by her clothes, which were those of a teenage boy — loose cotton pants and an oversized white shirt. Winding unerringly through the snack vendors and tea sellers who were hawking their wares on the station’s platform, his eyes settled on her slim, shapely figure. Her face was long and narrow, with an elegance of line markedly at odds with the severity of her haircut. There was no bindi on her forehead and her arms were free of bangles and bracelets, but on one of her ears was a silver stud, glinting brightly against the sun-deepened darkness of her skin.
Kanai liked to think that he had the true connoisseur’s ability to both praise and appraise women, and he was intrigued by the way she held herself, by the unaccustomed delineation of her stance. It occurred to him suddenly that perhaps, despite her silver ear stud and the tint of her skin, she was not Indian, except by descent. And the moment the thought occurred to him, he was convinced of it: she was a foreigner; it was stamped in her posture, in the way she stood, balancing on her heels like a flyweight boxer, with her feet planted apart. Among a crowd of college girls on Kolkata’s Park Street she might not have looked entirely out of place, but here, against the sooty backdrop of the commuter station at Dhakuria, the neatly composed androgyny of her appearance seemed out of place, almost exotic.
Why would a foreigner, a young woman, be standing in a south Kolkata commuter station, waiting for the train to Canning? It was true, of course, that this line was the only rail connection to the Sundarbans. But so far as he knew it was never used by tourists — the few who traveled in that direction usually went by boat, hiring steamers or launches on Kolkata’s riverfront. The train was mainly used by people who did daily-passengeri, coming in from outlying villages to work in the city.
He saw her turning to ask something of a bystander and was seized by an urge to listen in. Language was both his livelihood and his addiction, and he was often preyed upon by a near-irresistible compulsion to eavesdrop on conversations in public places. Pushing his way through the crowd, he arrived within earshot just in time to hear her finish a sentence that ended with the words “train to Canning?” One of the onlookers began to explain, gesticulating with an upraised arm. But the explanation was in Bengali and it was lost on her. She stopped the man with a raised hand and said, in apology, that she knew no Bengali: “Ami Bangla jani na.” He could tell from the awkwardness of her pronunciation that this was literally true: like strangers everywhere, she had learned just enough of the language to be able to provide due warning of her incomprehension.
Kanai was the one other “outsider” on the platform and he quickly attracted his own share of attention. He was of medium height and at the age of forty-two his hair, which was still thick, had begun to show a few streaks of gray at the temples. In the tilt of his head, as in the width of his stance, there was a quiet certainty, an indication of a well-grounded belief in his ability to prevail in most circumstances. Although his face was otherwise unlined, his eyes had fine wrinkles fanning out from their edges — but these grooves, by heightening the mobility of his face, emphasized more his youth than his age. Although he was once slight of build, his waist had thickened over the years but he still carried himself lightly, and with an alertness bred of the traveler’s instinct for inhabiting the moment.
It so happened that Kanai was carrying a wheeled airline bag with a telescoping handle. To the vendors and traveling salesmen who plied their wares on the Canning line, this piece of luggage was just one of the many details of Kanai’s appearance — along with his sunglasses, corduroy trousers an…