Product Description

The new novel from the author of The Glass Palace, the widely-acclaimed bestseller. The Hungry Tide is a rich, exotic saga set in Calcutta and in the vast archipelago of islands in the Bay of Bengal.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24478 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-03
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Sunday Times
'Marvellous...an ambitious, absorbing,vivid and deeply moving story...he writes with true grace'.

The Independant
'Skillfully depicts this truly vengeful place...where fantasy and reality constantly overlap'

Synopsis
Fom the author of The Glass Palace, the widely-acclaimed bestseller. The Hungry Tide is a rich, exotic saga set in Calcutta and in the vast archipelago of islands in the Bay of Bengal. An Indian myth says that when the river Ganges first descended from the heavens, the force of the cascade was so great that the earth would have been destroyed if it had not been for the god Shiva, who tamed the torrent by catching it in his dreadlocks. It is only when the Ganges approaches the Bay of Bengal that it frees itself and separates into thousands of wandering strands. The result is the Sundarbans, an immense stretch of mangrove forest, a half-drowned land where the waters of the Himalayas merge with the incoming tides of the sea. It is this vast archipelago of islands that provides the setting for Amitav Ghosh's new novel. In the Sundarbans the tides reach more than 100 miles inland and every day thousands of hectares of forest disappear only to re-emerge hours later. Dense as the mangrove forests are, from a human point of view it is only a little less barren than a desert. There is a terrible, vengeful beauty here, a place teeming with crocodiles, snakes, sharks and man-eating tigers.

This is the only place on earth where man is more often prey than predator. And it is into this terrain that an eccentric, wealthy Scotsman named Daniel Hamilton tried to create a utopian society, of all races and religions, and conquer the might of the Sundarbans. In January 2001, a small ship arrives to conduct an ecological survey of this vast but little-known environment, and the scientists on board begin to trace the journeys of the descendants of this society.

Customer Reviews

Evocative, intelligent, philisophical - though lacking in characterisation
"The Hungry Tide" is the latest novel from Indian-born author Amitav Ghosh. Set in the Sundarban archipelago in the delta of the River Ganges, it follows the experiences of two people after they meet on a train from Calcutta: Piya Roy, a young American marine biologist of Indian parentage; and middle-aged Kanai Dutt, a commercially successful interpreter and translator. Piya is arriving for the first time on a research trip to study the river dolphins of the Sundarbans; Kanai, on the other hand, is returning for the first time in many years, after a lost notebook left to him by his long-deceased uncle suddenly turns up. As outsiders, however, they both soon find that this environment is more alien to their ways of life than they once thought.

Ghosh's ability to evoke a sense of time and place is evident; his depiction of the 'tide country', as the Sundarban archipelago is often referred to, is excellent. The reader is shown a timeless place where history, myth and the present merge into one, in which Man and nature are locked in constant competition, vying for domination of the land. In stark contrast to this almost primitive struggle for survival, however, the author brings out the richness and diversity of these islands' culture in great detail. The Sundarbans themselves transcend geopolitical boundaries, lying as they do on the Indian-Bangladeshi border, and their culture reflects this, drawing on Hindu, Muslim and Christian traditions as much as local folklore.

A setting as fully realised as this requires strong characters to act as counterpoints. Unfortunately both Piya and Kanai come across as rather two-dimensional and struggle to hold the reader's interest. It is difficult to get a feel for the relationship between them or to understand the reasons behind their actions. Piya's entire raison d'etre appears to be her study of the river dolphins; never do we get the chance to see her as an emotional human being outside of her occupation. Sometimes, too, what we are told about a character jars with how he or she is portrayed: for example, Kanai's propensity for womanising fails to tally with his apparent unease around women. Part of the problem of characterisation may rest with the dialogue, which can on occasion feel somewhat clumsy. Also, though intelligently researched and full of thought-provoking themes, the prose is sometimes heavy-handed and lacks subtlety, instead of allowing the imagery to speak for itself and leaving the reader to draw his own conclusions.

In many ways "The Hungry Tide" feels less like a novel and more like a fictionalised study of Ghosh's chosen setting, with stories within stories within stories all serving to weave a complex tapestry of the places, people and histories that make up this fascinating environment. Although the characters require some patience from the reader, it therefore remains an absorbing read.

Enjoyable and better written than Glass Palace
I enjoyed this book. I liked getting an insiders view into an area I am very unlikely to visit in person woven into fiction. Characters come and go but I think that adds to the nature of the story.
It was a bit freaky and sad reading the sections about the cyclone and then the same day seeing images of same region (November 07) with its cylone devestation images blasted across the TV news.
In my view it was much better written than the Glass Palace and I shall look for new books out by this author.

A bit confusing
I'd heard great things about Amitav Ghosh and was looking forward to getting stuck into this, but as other readers have pointed out it wasn't easy to relate to the characters. The chapters are short and alternate between the stories of Piya, Kanai and Kanai's uncle which can become a bit confusing and choppy. I found that the character i liked best was Fokir and we barely hear him talk! This novel is clearly well researched and the descriptions of the sundarbans and the animals found there are lovely, however i did struggle to get through it and doubt i'll read it again.