Ghost–Eye

A moving and urgent novel by the bestselling author of the Ibis trilogy about past lives and saving our future.

Calcutta, September 1969

Varsha Gupta wants fish for her lunch. Her family can't understand it; the three-year-old has never tasted fish in her life. The Guptas are strict vegetarians and don't allow it inside their Calcutta mansion. But Varsha claims she can remember another life, a mud house by a river where she caught and cooked fish with a different mother.

Perplexed, the Guptas turn to Dr. Shoma Bose, a psychiatrist who has been investigating what are known as 'cases of the reincarnation type' for years. But her understanding of the world is changed forever by Varsha's revelations.

Half a century later, Varsha's therapeutic case file catches the attention of a group of environmental activists, and Shoma's nephew Dinu is drawn inexorably into their plans. And as Dinu finds himself caught up in the search for Varsha, buried memories of his own past begin to surface.

Travelling between late-sixties Calcutta and present-day Brooklyn, Ghost-Eye is an urgent and expansive novel about family, fate and our fragile planet.

Review

Depicts 1960s Calcutta . . . with sensorial richness . . . Ghosh is as sure-footed as ever when providing historical context for the region . . . With its rising sea levels and intensifying cyclonicweather, the Sundarbans emerge as a landscape under acute environmental pressure; its fragile ecology increasingly threatened by large-scale industrial exploitation . . . What lingers is . . . a grounded sense of a world shaped by shared memory ― Financial Times

A magical realist novel that believes in magic . . . Ghosh writes with a winning panache ― Sunday Times, Antonia Senior

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 -- Robert Macfarlane, author of IS A RIVER ALIVE?

Metempsychosis, reincarnation - Amitav Ghosh's Ghost-Eye challenges you to believe, and on the way engages you with a gripping story of youth and self-knowledge -- Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of THEFT and AFTERLIVES

Ghost-Eye is a marvel that will ignite a reader's sense of wonder - a masterful novel, at once simple and capacious. Ghosh is one of our finest writers -- Rabih Alameddine, National Book Award–winning author of THE TRUE TRUE STORY OF RAJA THE GULLIBLE (AND HIS MOTHER)

Amitav Ghosh's intellectual panache and serene mastery of form make him one of the last great practitioners of the novel of ideas. Ghost-Eye is the most captivating expression yet of an imagination unfettered by the protocols of the liberal-humanist novel: a novel that explores the very real, if still oddly underexplored, world of the spirit that hundreds of millions of people inhabit simultaneously with its material counterpart -- Pankaj Mishra, author of THE WORLD AFTER GAZA and RUN AND HIDE

Ghost-Eye is a brilliant return to Ghosh's speculative vein, haunting and liberating as it confronts hierarchies ancient and modern -- Siddhartha Deb, author of THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE WORLD and TWILIGHT PRISONERS

Amitav Ghosh has done more than any novelist to reimagine the role of fiction in our age of environmental emergency. In Ghost-Eye, he draws the reader from the world we know into a shadow realm of reincarnation and levitation, of talking trees and whispering spirits. Mournful and exhilarating -- Nathaniel Rich, author of CLOUDTHIEF and LOSING EARTH

Imagines a world where cases of reincarnation invigorate the climate movement ― Straits Times

About the Author

Amitav Ghosh is the author of the bestselling Ibis trilogy, comprised of Sea of Poppies (short-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize), River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire. His other novels include The Circle of Reason, which won the Prix Médicis étranger, and The Glass Palace. He is the author of many works of nonfiction, including The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable and The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. He holds two lifetime achievement awards and four honorary doctorates. In 2015, he was named as a finalist of the Man Booker International Prize. In 2018, Ghosh became the first English-language writer to receive the Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary honor, and in 2024 he was awarded the Laureate Erasmus Prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.