Ghost-Eye

by Amitav Ghosh

Magical realism meets 1960s India in a novel about a girl with mysterious powers—who might be able to access memories of a past life.

The Gupta household is in a state of three-year-old Varsha, beloved daughter of strictly vegetarian Hindu parents, has just demanded to be served fish. Moreover, she possesses an inexplicable knowledge of different species and preparations— knowledge that almost seems to have come from a past life.

Perplexed, the Guptas turn to Dr. Shoma Bose, a psychiatrist who lives with her husband, Monty, and nephew Dinu in Calcutta. Little do they know that Shoma has been investigating what she calls “cases of the reincarnation type” for years—and in Varsha, she may have found her next patient. Such cases, she believes, are much more common than people realize, and she sets out to prove that Varsha led a past life that her wealthy family can barely fathom—and that she might possess special powers, too.

Meanwhile, Dinu grows up oblivious to the research Shoma has been conducting in secret. Years later, while sorting through his late aunt’s possessions, he uncovers Varsha’s case file—and so begins a quest to track her down. If Varsha really is a “ghost-eye,” then her unique abilities could be what’s needed to thwart plans for a new coal plant that will destroy one of India’s last pristine wildernesses. Moving from 1970s Calcutta to our ecologically threatened present, Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye is a captivating work of magical realism for our time.

Genres: India, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

336 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication June 16, 2026

About the author

Amitav Ghosh is an Indian writer. He won the 54th Jnanpith award in 2018, India's highest literary honour. Ghosh's ambitious novels use complex narrative strategies to probe the nature of national and personal identity, particularly of the people of India and South Asia. He has written historical fiction and non-fiction works discussing topics such as colonialism and climate change.
Ghosh studied at The Doon School, Dehradun, and earned a doctorate in social anthropology at the University of Oxford. He worked at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi and several academic institutions. His first novel, The Circle of Reason, was published in 1986, which he followed with later fictional works, including The Shadow Lines and The Glass Palace. Between 2004 and 2015, he worked on the Ibis trilogy, which revolves around the build-up and implications of the First Opium War. His non-fiction work includes In an Antique Land (1992) and The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016).
Ghosh holds two Lifetime Achievement awards and four honorary doctorates. In 2007, he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India's highest honours, by the President of India. In 2010, he was a joint winner, along with Margaret Atwood, of a Dan David prize, and in 2011, he was awarded the Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis festival in Montreal. He was the first English-language writer to receive the award. In 2019, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade.

Reviews

[Madhul Sharma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Since magical realism is the few genres of fiction I enjoy, I was pretty excited to read this book, and am so glad I did! This is by no means Ghosh's best work, and is in fact very attached to some of his older books and themes, but it is a page turner.

What I love about his current writing is the overlap of climate change with poetry, beauty and magic, and I really really loved the process of the protagonist recreating a childhood Bengali dish in Brooklyn. I always read fiction to get back into reading, and Ghosh's writing is so smooth that I was up all Friday night with a book!!

[Shashank · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was one of the very different themes explored by the author, I think it is a small step towards magical realism and supernatural themes. The plot revolved around Calcutta of the 70s-80s, Boston, Sunderbans and the core of theme of Bengal and Bengali’s as an identity. These places and themes have been recurrent even in the past works of the writer (Junglenama, The Great Derangement). It didn’t click with me well, a dose of deja vu from all the work I have admired from the writer, hence a bit disappointing for me. Maybe next time? Sure lets wait.

[Saumya Singh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a quick read it was. Very different from other Amitav Ghosh's Books.

[Akshat Upadhyay · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a lot to unpack here.
First the story. Let’s get the story’s major non-spoiler parts out of the way, since the fiction serves only as a vessel to carry forward ideas and introduce some new ones that I first encountered in The Nutmeg’s Curse and later in Gun Island and Wild Fictions. The chapters alternate between two timelines: 1969 and 2019. The former is about Varsha Gupta - a 3 year old born in a pure vegetarian Marwari family in then Calcutta who starts ‘remembering’ her past life and yearns for fish - a shock to her family. She is then examined by Shoma Bose, a psychologist who is coincidentally a PhD from the University of Virginia in the field of ‘cases of the reincarnation type’. Through a series of tests using culinary combinations of Bengali fish preparation, she confirms her hypothesis about Varsha’s previous life as a fisherwoman in the Sunderbans and how she was killed. In the meantime, other characters in this timeline encountered include Dev, a Nepalese boy from Burma, through which Nat - a family of Burmese spirits - is introduced to the readers. One of these spirits, the Shindaw Nat plays a major role in the story - as a bridge between incidents, cases of precognition and remote viewing mostly.
This timeline, arguably, is the more engaging of the two, as it focuses on the exploration of - Calcutta in the late 1960s, the distance between faith and praxis when the Gupta family comes face to face with reincarnation within their family , the innovative way through which Shoma deduces the background of Varsha’s previous self and finally the significant convergence and divergences between science and belief.
The timeline of 2019-2020 is centred on an ailing Shoma Bose and her nephew Dinanath Datta aka Dinu, whose life flits between New York and Kolkata. We also meet Tipu and Rafi whom we had first encountered in the author’s 2019 book, The Gun Island, and who are now managing a trust in the Sundarbans. The latter somehow impress upon the former the importance of unveiling the identity of one Case J, under Shoma Bose in the late 1960s and her importance to their mission of stopping corporate plunder of the Sundarbans. And it is in this part that the writing and story both flounder. The reasons behind Tipu’s demands are not very convincing and once we reach the climax of the book, the plot just fizzles out. The dialogues between Tipu and Dinu are cringe and Tipu’s Brooklyn affectation sounds very amateurish. Also, the amount of coincidences that happen to assist Dinu in his search for Case J are too many to be statistically insignificant. Corporate power is also referred to as a monolithic abstraction which is wholly evil. There is a minor ‘reveal’ towards the end which is average.

I don’t know whether it was meant as a tip of the hat to a famous writer or towards an obsessive search for extraterrestrial life but there are episodic references to orbs of light whenever something bad is about to happen in the world (Stephen King’s IT and incidents of alien UFOs in the documentary Age of Disclosure).
Now that the story is laid out, it’s time for the ideas.
The core of the book is about the interconnectedness of life across space and time. The book argues for a more compassionate and unconventional take on what life and living means - beyond materialism and embracing mysticism. Ghosh doubles down on his critique of the Cartesian notion of the mind-matter duality; that humans, non-humans and even objects considered part of the ‘non-living’ world - all are part of a wider continuum of consciousness. Hindus call it the Brahman which is an all-pervading consciousness. The Atman is the physical manifestation of that Brahman which is expressed in multiple forms including humans.
Ghosh mounts a saturation assault on all the epistemic and ontological truths held dear by humans and dissects certain assumptions passed on through generations. All these can be boiled down to the fact that humans consider that the non-human and non-living world is inert till humans give it meaning. He braids the laboratory (Bohr, Bose), the archive (Cold War parapsychology, Soviet sky incidents), and the subcontinent’s mythic textures (Manasa Devi, Sahajiya traditions, animist speech across species) to propose a reality where consciousness and agency leak across the borders we police. Reincarnation becomes both a doctrinal claim and a narrative ethics that forces responsibility to travel across lifetimes and ecosystems, making the Sundarbans and Calcutta moral instruments with their own agency.
His biggest action through the story: restore legitimacy to non-linear time, porous personhood, animacy in the “non-living,” moral charge of matter and knowledge that arrives via body, dream, omen and story rather than instruments alone. He reiterates that the boundary between the living and non-living is constructed in human minds, especially through European dominated science rather than the reality “as-it-is”. JC Bose plight in Europe (referenced in the book early) exemplifies the discrimination faced by indigenous researchers who were audacious enough to question the primacy of Cartesian duality. Bose’s original sin was not limited to questioning the European ‘mental model’, so to say, but also being colonised and using Western principles to draw conclusions that conformed more to what was then termed Eastern mysticism.
By using reincarnation as a plot device , Ghost inverts the comfortable conventions of the linearity of time (at human scale) and argues for a more cyclical narrative. He tantalisingly holds a question over everyone’s head: if one assumes that reincarnation occurs, then what happens in the interregnum between the passing of a soul from one body to another. He also brings in a counter-question within the same section: what if the concept of karma is a human notion of trying to bring order and (dare I say predictability) to the concept of birth and re-birth and imposing some sort of control over this cycle.
There is a very small para where Tipu, during his harangue about corporate power calls into question the entire scaffolding of AI achieving human intelligence. He argues that AI was conceptualised as mimicking the human brain which was supposed to be the site of human intelligence. However, it is the body with its gravy train of feelings, premonitions and forebodings, that is actually responsible for intelligence and the brain “only gets in the way”. This is provocative on purpose. It is a rebuke to the techno-utopian idea that mind is just computation. Even if the claim is overstated, it works as novelistic polemic and is meant to sting.
The book weaves its tale around the concept of structural violence, as Ghosh’s long-running preoccupation is the climate crisis not just as a scientific issue, but as a crisis of imagination and form. Snippets from his writing recall the efforts by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who places indigenous knowledge on equal footing with scientific knowledge, treating plants as teachers not resources and framing ecology as reciprocity. This form of theorising is reinforced by a lecture on Pilgrims and Thanksgiving Day by Dr Roy Casagranda where he argues that when Pilgrims, a group of radical religious zealots who arrived in Massachusetts with "no idea how to farm or survive”, they were saved by Native Americans who gave them seeds and food to prevent them from starving from death. Dr Roy argues that Americans often hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously: that Native Americans were "savages" who didn't know how to farm (justifying European land theft) yet they also celebrate a holiday where those same "savages" taught the Europeans how to farm. Some of the tribes like Iroquois had complex constitutions, bicameral legislatures (including a lower house run entirely by women) and established agricultural systems long before European arrival. Certain movies like Avatar (Part I) also provide an interesting dramatisation of this relationship. The Tree of Life can be imagined as a networked system where roots act as data conduits, memory is stored in ecology and identity is distributed across a biospheric system.
Ghosh also takes a jab at the tech bro culture and the poisonous idea of progress as being too techno-centric. The Malthusian belief that catastrophe is an inevitable regulatory mechanism resurfaces in 21st century techno-elite imagination where climate collapse, resource scarcity and social breakdown are treated as unavoidable and therefore best managed through technological enclosures rather than prevented through collective restraint or repair. The Ark (not mentioned in the book but emerges as a collective for the brain upload experiments, anti-ageing, seed vaults and climate-resilient enclaves) becomes a chilling metaphor for this mindset: a finite, exclusionary vessel built by those with foresight, capital and technical skill, justified by a narrative that frames mass death as both natural and morally neutral. This technocentric vision of progress, Ghosh suggests, crowds out older and less glamorous notions of advancement rooted in reciprocity, ecological balance and shared vulnerability which are ways of living that indigenous societies practiced but colonial modernity systematically dismantled. What Ghost Eye ultimately questions is not technology itself, but the quiet acceptance of selective survival as a reasonable outcome and the way technicism anesthetises moral discomfort by translating civilisational failure into an optimisation problem. Progress, in this telling, becomes a machine that saves a few while rendering the rest conceptually expendable.
In Ghosh’s telling, the planet is alive in more ways than one but our conventions and frames of mind do not allow us to notice them. Modernity survives by declaring most of that aliveness “irrational.” The real antagonist is not superstition; it’s technicism which is the insistence that only one kind of knowing is legitimate.
Ghost Eye does not question whether superstitious practices are to be believed or whether faith trumps science or vice-versa. He just asks a simple question: why do we believe one set of principles over another?

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Amitav Ghosh’s 'Ghost-eye' felt, at first, like stepping into a room where the lights are already on but the windows have been sealed shut. Nothing dramatic happens immediately. There is no explosion of plot, no lyrical overture announcing grand themes. Instead, there is a steady, unsettling awareness of being watched, classified, interpreted.

As the novel unfolded, that sensation deepened into something more disturbing: the realization that this gaze is not hostile in the traditional sense. It is administrative, procedural, and indifferent. 'Ghost-eye' does not threaten you; it normalizes you. And in doing so, it quietly dismantles many of the consolations that political fiction has taught us to expect.

This novel occupies a peculiar place within Ghosh’s body of work. Readers familiar with the sweeping historical architectures of 'The Shadow Lines', 'The Glass Palace', or the Ibis trilogy might initially feel disoriented. Those novels move across oceans and empires, tracing how colonial power reshapes lives through conquest, commerce, and displacement. 'Ghost-eye', by contrast, barely moves at all. It contracts rather than expands.

Borders are no longer crossed; they are internalized. The violence Ghosh examines here is not spectacular or imperial in the old sense. It is quiet, procedural, and epistemic. Power no longer needs ships or armies. It needs files, databases, and ways of seeing.

From its opening pages, 'Ghost-eye' establishes an atmosphere of watchfulness so pervasive that it becomes the novel’s true protagonist. The titular eye is not a character, nor a metaphor that can be comfortably decoded. It is a mode of perception that claims neutrality while exercising control.

This is vision stripped of empathy, observation severed from understanding. The novel insists, again and again, that to see is not to know. In fact, seeing may be precisely what prevents knowing, because the act of classification replaces judgment with procedure.

Ghosh’s prose mirrors this thematic concern with chilling precision. Gone is the lush lyricism that animates his riverine landscapes or maritime epics. In its place is a clipped, restrained language that feels closer to reporting than confession.

Sentences do not swell; they register. Scenes do not crescendo; they accumulate. At times, the narrative reads like a dossier, a collection of observations without interpretive warmth. This stylistic austerity is not a failure of imagination. It is the novel’s method.

Ghosh understands that to critique systems of surveillance, one must risk reproducing their texture. The novel watches its characters the way the system watches them, and in doing so, it implicates the reader in the same cold gaze.
The protagonist, whose inner life remains deliberately opaque, is not designed for identification in the conventional sense. He is neither hero nor villain, neither rebel nor victim. He is a relay point, a functionary consciousness caught between institutional obligation and creeping doubt.

Ghosh refuses to grant him the kind of moral grandeur that often anchors political fiction. There are no stirring speeches, no decisive acts of defiance that restore narrative equilibrium. Instead, we watch as ethical responsibility dissolves into workflow.

Decisions are made not because they are right, but because they are required. The terrifying implication is that no one needs to be cruel for cruelty to occur.

What unsettled me most, reading 'Ghost-eye', was its treatment of knowledge. Information circulates constantly throughout the novel. Reports are written, files updated, interpretations revised. Yet clarity recedes rather than advances. The more data accumulates, the more reality fragments.

Ghosh seems deeply skeptical of modern epistemologies that promise transparency through accumulation. Knowledge here does not liberate; it manages uncertainty in ways that preserve hierarchy. Truth is not suppressed so much as rendered irrelevant. This is not ignorance as failure, but ignorance as infrastructure.

Placed in conversation with classic surveillance novels, 'Ghost-eye' reveals its distinctiveness. George Orwell’s 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' looms large over any discussion of surveillance, but the contrast is instructive. Orwell’s world is loud, ideological, and brutally explicit. Power demands fear, loyalty, and love. Surveillance is theatrical. The telescreen announces itself.

Ghosh’s ghost-eye, by contrast, is quiet. It does not demand allegiance. It does not even demand belief. It merely requires compliance. Where Orwell dramatizes totalitarianism as ideological domination, Ghosh examines technocratic governance where harm emerges as a byproduct rather than an intention. The terror is not fanaticism but neutrality.

In this respect, 'Ghost-eye' feels closer to Kafka than Orwell. Like 'The Trial' or 'The Castle', it depicts a world where authority is dispersed, inaccessible, and fundamentally opaque. Yet even Kafka’s bureaucracies possess a metaphysical absurdity that borders on the surreal.

Ghosh strips away that strangeness. His systems are painfully recognizable. They resemble contemporary intelligence agencies, immigration regimes, academic institutions, and data-driven corporations. The nightmare is not symbolic. It is procedural.

Comparisons with contemporary fiction further clarify Ghosh’s intervention. Novels like Arundhati Roy’s 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness' or Mohsin Hamid’s 'Exit West' grapple with state power, borders, and surveillance, but they do so through overtly political and emotional registers. Roy’s novel is maximalist, insurgent, filled with rage and tenderness in equal measure. Hamid deploys allegory and magical realism to render displacement legible and humane.

Ghosh refuses both lyric excess and allegorical consolation. 'Ghost-eye' is not interested in resistance as spectacle. It is interested in complicity as condition.

This refusal makes the novel emotionally austere, even frustrating. There are moments when I longed for a character to break the frame, to articulate outrage, to reclaim moral agency in a way that would reassure me as a reader.

But the novel consistently withholds such relief. Over time, I came to understand that this withholding is ethical. To provide catharsis would be to misrepresent the nature of the system Ghosh is describing. Surveillance regimes do not collapse because someone feels deeply enough. They persist precisely because feeling itself becomes inefficient.

The novel’s kinship with works by Teju Cole and Don DeLillo becomes apparent here. Like Cole’s 'Open City', 'Ghost-eye' is fascinated by educated subjects who witness injustice without intervening. But where Cole foregrounds interior monologue and aesthetic self-scrutiny, Ghosh drains interiority almost entirely. Thought itself becomes procedural. Reflection is replaced by reporting. With DeLillo, particularly 'White Noise' or 'Point Omega', Ghosh shares a concern with abstraction and mediated catastrophe. Yet DeLillo often tempers his critique with irony and dark humor. Ghosh offers no such release. His moral tone is closer to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the banality of evil: violence not as monstrous intent, but as routinized action.

Within Ghosh’s own oeuvre, 'Ghost-eye' feels like a conceptual descendant of 'The Calcutta Chromosome'. Both novels question the authority of official knowledge and expose the limits of scientific rationality.

But where 'The Calcutta Chromosome' indulges in narrative play and conspiracy, suggesting hidden forms of resistance beneath dominant epistemologies, 'Ghost-eye' is bleaker. There is no counter-archive here, no secret wisdom waiting to be recovered. The archive itself has become the instrument of control. Knowledge no longer hides truth; it replaces it.

This is where 'Ghost-eye' diverges sharply from contemporary techno-dystopias such as Dave Eggers’s 'The Circle'. Those novels critique surveillance capitalism through exaggeration and satire. Ghosh avoids both.

There are no grotesque corporations, no cartoonish villains, no speculative futures that can be comfortably dismissed. The world of 'Ghost-eye' feels like the present, stripped of comforting illusions. Its refusal of satire makes it harder to read, but also harder to ignore. It insists on being taken as diagnosis rather than warning.

Historically, Ghosh has always been attentive to the afterlives of empire, and that concern persists here in a subtler form. The administrative logics governing the ghost-eye feel eerily colonial: classification, enumeration, observation without intimacy.

The novel suggests that empire has not disappeared; it has been miniaturized and digitized. Power no longer marches visibly. It monitors quietly. The past survives not in monuments, but in methods.

One of the novel’s most unsettling claims is that surveillance reshapes not just behavior, but subjectivity itself. Characters begin to anticipate judgment before it arrives. They internalize suspicion. The most effective surveillance, Ghosh suggests, is psychological. Fear becomes ambient rather than acute. This is not the fear of imminent punishment, but the low-grade anxiety of constant evaluation. It produces efficiency, caution, self-editing. Fear becomes infrastructure.

The absence of overt cruelty in the novel is precisely what makes it disturbing. No one tortures anyone. No one orders mass violence. Yet harm accumulates. Lives are misclassified. Decisions ripple outward with consequences no one claims. Responsibility disperses until it evaporates. Reading these sections, I felt a quiet horror more intense than any depiction of brutality. The novel suggests that the most dangerous systems are not those that hate us, but those that do not need to care about us at all.

The ending of 'Ghost-eye' refuses closure in a way that aligns it with novels like Kazuo Ishiguro’s 'Never Let Me Go'. There is no revelation that restores moral balance, no collapse of the system that would justify narrative endurance.

The system persists. Life continues. This lack of resolution may frustrate readers accustomed to political fiction offering redemption or resistance. I found it devastatingly appropriate. Systems like the one Ghosh depicts do not end with answers. They end with normalization.

Personally, reading 'Ghost-eye' forced me to confront my own comfort with visibility. How easily do I accept being documented in exchange for convenience? How often do I mistake transparency for safety? Ghosh does not accuse. He reflects. The novel watches the reader watching, and that inversion lingers long after the final page. I finished the book feeling less outraged than unsettled, less mobilized than implicated.

Compared to Ghosh’s earlier novels, which often locate ethical possibility in recovered histories or alternative narratives, 'Ghost-eye' offers no such refuge. There is no suppressed voice waiting to be amplified. The machinery of power has learned to absorb dissent as data. In this sense, the novel feels pessimistic, but also brutally honest. It refuses the liberal fantasy that exposure alone leads to justice.

What emerges, when the novel is read alongside Orwell, Kafka, DeLillo, Roy, Hamid, Coetzee, and even Ghosh’s own earlier work, is its unique contribution to the literature of power. If Orwell warned us about tyranny as spectacle, and contemporary dystopias warn us about corporate overreach, Ghosh warns us about normalization. About what happens when being seen becomes the condition of being. When existence itself requires legibility.

Stylistically and ethically, 'Ghost-eye' is a demanding novel. It offers no comfort, no uplift, no easy moral alignment. It asks the reader to endure uncertainty, ethical thinning, and affective flatness. That endurance is the point.

Ghosh recreates the psychological atmosphere of surveillance not to entertain, but to instruct the senses. You do not simply read about the ghost-eye. You feel its gaze.

In the end, 'Ghost-eye' stands as one of Ghosh’s most austere and unsettling works. It may lack the narrative sweep of his historical epics, but it compensates with philosophical precision. It captures a condition rather than a conflict. A world where power no longer needs to announce itself, where violence is clean, administrative, and polite, and where ethical life erodes not through shock, but through routine.

Closing the book, I did not feel enlightened so much as altered. More cautious. More aware of how systems of seeing shape what can be felt, thought, and imagined.

'Ghost-eye' does not tell us how to resist. It shows us how resistance has become difficult to recognize.

And that, in a literary landscape crowded with noise, may be its most radical achievement.

Take a bow author!! A most recommended work.

[HSB · Rating 3 out of 5]

In its best parts this book feels like a ghost story telling session at the fag end of a party - when the only people present are people either closely knit (or feel they are closely knit, being the last people at a party), or too drunk to care about the judgment of others. It allows you a swift glimpse into the fantastical experiences and beliefs of the seemingly straitlaced and rational.

In its worst parts, it feels like the ghost story (or ghosh story if you will) session spiralling out of control under the influence of alcohol and propinquity. The guests, some of whom you considered friends are now, you feel, using the fig leaf of spirituality to get unnecessarily personal, speaking with a great degree of confidence and presumptuousness about your past lives, and co-opting you into a seance where participation is mandatory, and scepticism no longer an option.

GE takes up more or less from where Gun Island left off. Now I thought GI was terrible. Seeing these familiar characters make a comeback made me quite annoyed and irritated with my tendency to wade into a book with as little foreknowledge as possible.

Dinu aka Deen the fusty and slightly boring narrator of Gun Island, is back, as are Piya and Tipu from GI and The Hungry Tide, putting in extended guest cameos.

Having said that, warts and all GE is a much better, fun read than its predecessor.

The plot explores Dinu's childhood, the happiest parts of which are spent with his uncle and aunt, a doctor and a pscyhologist. The couple soon become deeply enmeshed in the past life reminiscences of the daughter of a family acquaintance.

In a more contemporary timeline, an elderly Dinu plods through the pandemic, remotely caring for his ailing aunt, while being urged to seek connections in his past that will unlock a solution to the most pressing problems of the present and the future - climate change, and a growth at all costs approach to development.

GE starts of promisingly with a frission of spookiness - the sort of tales of the supernatural you've almost certainly heard if you've spent any amount of time around drunk and/or sleep deprived Indians. Past life memories, mysterious goings on, intuitive flashes that reveal the hidden nature of the universe are all par for the course.

Except, there is a difference between a group of people watching The Exorcist, and the same group actually calling an exorcist, and GE crosses that line with startling rapidity.

Dinu's aunt after a near death experience begins communing with the dead on the regular; there's almost no one in Dinu's past or present who isn't possessed of spiritualist powers, and Dinu becomes an all too important conduit to getting all these woowoo elements to harmonise, until they are woowooing like its the unnecessarily long outro to Sympathy for the Devil

It feels sad in a way - and I've mentioned this in my review of The Nutmeg's Curse as well - an erudite sensitive man becoming increasingly credulous in his old age, prepared to accept impossibilities (or, well, improbabilities to give AG some benefit of doubt) in an unquestioning manner, after experiencing several of the crushing blows life has in store for all of us.

While there's no way of gauging an author's intentions, it feels like propaganda. Like the time Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made Professor Challenger, discoverer of dinosaurs, a mouthpiece for spiritualist claptrap.

What's also disappointing is the way it is written. This plot with the more ornate prose and rhythms of Ghosh's debut The Circle of Reason - which seemed to owe quite a debt to the magic realism of Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez - would have been a far more entertaining read.

Except rather than magic realism - defined by Matthew Strecher as "what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe", GE gives you a highly strange setting detailed in a very prosaic conversational manner, invaded by things that are too real to comfortably inhabit the same space.

It's a wish fulfilment fantasy, that is reluctant to come to terms with its fantastical nature.

Towards the end, GE becomes a nonsense equivalent of a supersized Big Mac. A group of activists stage a miracle with the help of one of the many powerful spiritual humans who inhabit the narrative, to stop a potentially heinous environmental disaster. Dinu is revealed to be an fishing otter in a previous birth, and a brother to a fisherwoman who owned him. I guarantee I'm not making any of this up.

I don't know if Ghosh intended this to be funny; I suspect he imagined it would be very emotionally affecting, but I found this uproarious and silly. It feels cringe inducing and embarrasing akin to watching videos of credulous Indians worshipping trash cans, guzzling water from an AC outlet imagining it to be blessed, and bowing before a sick dog that was walking around in circles believing it to be motivated by piety.

It's a sad testament to the nonsense that comes rushing in to fill the void left by the scientific temper that India's first PM hoped to inculcate among its citizens.

[Rahul Vishnoi · Rating 5 out of 5]

-In A Never Ending Loop of Life-Death-Life-
Review of 'Ghost-Eye'

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"𝐈𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐛𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐧𝐞, 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐲 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐛𝐞 𝐭𝐨𝐥𝐝. 𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐝𝐨 𝐢𝐭? 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐲 𝐬𝐮𝐜𝐡 𝐚 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐕𝐚𝐫𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫, 𝐃𝐢𝐩𝐢𝐤𝐚, 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐲 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐚𝐥. 𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐨𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐟𝐚𝐫 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐛𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐝𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝'𝐬 𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫: 𝐬𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐲 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐆𝐮𝐣𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐭 𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬, 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧, 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐬𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐮𝐧𝐮𝐬𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐭-𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐩. 𝐓𝐨 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞'𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐟, 𝐬𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐜𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐛𝐞𝐝𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐦 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐡𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐫, 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐬 𝐡𝐞𝐧𝐧𝐚𝐞𝐝, 𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐡; 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥, 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐬𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐛𝐞𝐝 𝐝𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐫. 𝐍𝐨 𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐲𝐞𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐧 𝐡𝐞𝐫, 𝐦𝐮𝐜𝐡 𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐧𝐞𝐰𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬. 𝐀𝐬 𝐢𝐟 𝐛𝐲 𝐦𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐲𝐚𝐡𝐬 𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐥𝐞 𝐒𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐞𝐩."


Ghost-Eye is a masterpiece in writing. Period. Ghosh's words are silken, his story strong. When you don't realise how the pages fly, a master has been at work, day and night, crafting those wings with quill and paper. Reading Amitav Ghosh is an experience you would not want to miss.

So what is it about? 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 Shoma's understanding of the world is changed forever by Varsha's revelations. Half a century later, when Varsha's therapeutic case file catches the attention of a group of environmental activists, 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 from one of our greatest living storytellers, about family, fate and our fragile planet.

The author brings a hammer upon religious customs, environmental abuse and a general sense of indifference towards the planet. And he does that effortlessly, and at some places, cheekily with a chuckle hiding between the lines. Ghosh weaves a bundle of fictional thunderbolts and unleashes it upon the readers when they least expect him to.

The book is like life knitted into a story.
I am glad to have read the words that rose out of the bottom of your heart, Mr Ghosh.

[S Vijay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Climate change, human displacement, and developmental pressures are serious topics. Most of us would rather steer clear of these vexing issues of our times and eat, drink, and take selfies instead.

Moreover, Amitav Ghosh and the Nobel Prize for Literature are already being spoken of in the same breath—at least among the literati of the subcontinent. His works are therefore, regrettably, straitjacketed as literature; and it is no secret that literature is not read.

So we have a double whammy here: a weighty set of themes addressed in a book by a well-established literary figure. This dense combination threatens to consign Amitav Ghosh’s latest offering to the dusty far corners of reference libraries, joining the ranks of books that are often quoted but seldom read.

While Amitav Ghosh may not have said it in so many words (I was present at his interview during the launch of Ghost-Eye), he clearly hopes this book will serve as an eye-opener and a wake-up call for the uninterested masses. To achieve this subversive end-goal—of making readers look Beyond Developmentality (the title of a book by Debal Deb, who gave up the good life to become a seed conservationist, and whose selfless work inspired some of the passages on dying or forgotten indigenous rice varieties)—Ghosh serves up these subjects as literature-lite, mixing them with ever-popular themes such as love; love of food; authentic home cooking with fresh, local ingredients; miracles (magical realism); and even miraculous reincarnations. Bengalis and their love for fish—especially freshwater fish—is another familiar cliché that the author throws into the recipe mix.

I am writing this review to plug the book as someone who finds reading literature tough going. I read Ghost-Eye in one continuous sitting, qualifying it as unputdownable—very much in league with the best fast-paced fiction novels I have read, at least in terms of ease and momentum.

So do consider reading Ghost-Eye, and watch yourself get gently seduced into a world of hope and possibility—on the brink of an eminently plausible Malthusian event, for which the ultra-rich are already preparing assiduously, by building bunkers on remote islands or even attempting to raise settlements on Mars.

[Subodh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know why Goodreads has classed this book as 'not published.' I bought it on Kindle.

I am a rationalist, with little use for spirits, paranormal, and things like rebirth. It is a tribute to the storytelling prowess of Amitav Ghosh that he made me suspend my judgment and immerse myself into this story that has all these things as essential parts.

The narrator Dinu has an aunt Shoma who is a psychiatrist, married to Monty who is a doctor. Monty involves his wife when one of her patients, three year old Varsha starts remembering her past life. What is worse, she insists on eating fish - much to the horror of her pure vegetarian Marwari family. Shoma has been working with Doctor Booth, and American, who has investigated many claims of rebirth. As she tries to help Varsha, she is repeatedly amazed by things Varsha can recall about her pas life - things that were verified as correct on visiting the village where she claims to have lived and died.

The author makes no attempt to debunk or provide a rational explanation for these strange happenings. Apart from remembering her past life, Varsha also has the uncanny ability to see things at a distance and sense impending events. The narrative is built skilfully to dent the reader's scepticism and make them wonder if, after all, there could be something in such claims.

The later half of the book appeared a little weak to me, although I read it at one sitting because some revelation appeared to be around the corner. The revelation, when it came, proved to be far-fetched and somewhat of an anti-climax. In between the author brings in the divide between the rich and the poor and the havoc being wrought on the natural environment by crony capitalists. His response is to rely on the supernatural to deal with their depredations. That sounds like an attitude of helplessness - when you have no other recourse than God to deal with a problem! I was looking for a better ending.

The book has not dented my rationalism or made me believe in rebirth and spirits, but it was a good read.

[Shreeharsha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in alternate timeline between 1969 and 2019; Amitav Ghost’s new book unfolds with three year old Varsha Gupta who had never saw fish, starts to demand for fish and starts narrating her previous life where she and her mother would catch and cook fish. Gupta’s get appalled by this incident and consults Dr Shoma Bose who had dealt with this type of cases earlier. Shoma starts clinical interview with Varsha Gupta and finds out that she has died by snake bite in her previous life. Whereas in 2019, Shoma’s nephew Dinanath Dutta known as Dinu in novel and Tipu, who runs a NGO in Sunderbans are trying to uncover why Shoma has visited Sunderbans in 1969. Coincidentally, Shoma before dying leaves some files named as Case J for Dinu. What’s the relationship between Case J and Shoma’s visit to Sunderbans? Why Tipu wants to know about that case ? What happened to Varsha ? Is she still alive ? These questions are answered by Amitav Ghosh in this novel.

Writing style of Ghosh is very engaging with dual narrators and story set in different places such as Calcutta, Sunderbans,Brooklyn. Novel deals with several themes like Reincarnation, Burmese spirts called Nat (mainly Shindaw nat), Japanese invasion of Burma, Legend of Manasa Devi. You will also get lots of information about variety’ of fishes and Bengali dishes made up of fish such as Doi Maach. Ghosh as always creates awareness about ecological imbalances and environmental issues and how billionaires for their greed are destroying environment. The way how both timelines combine at the end and how everyone is related to each other, involvement of supernatural elements are amazing.

Ghost Eye by Amitav Ghosh is definitely recommended for readers who love to read stories involving reincarnation and other magical realism events.

[Tina Bhowmik · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t know why more people aren’t talking about the quiet beauty of Ghost Eye. This book deserves to be lingered over.

If you love magical realism, the nostalgia of Kolkata, folklore, and a touch of mysticism, this one will speak to you. The story begins in 1960s Calcutta, and the way Ghosh brings that world alive felt deeply personal to me — like being gently walked back into childhood. It’s true what the book hints at: today’s Kolkata is different, even the spelling has changed, but we remember Calcutta with a certain tenderness, a softness that refuses to fade.

The novel moves along two parallel threads. One is the story of Varsha, a three-year-old Marwari girl brought to a psychiatrist because she insists on eating fish. A small detail, but loaded with tension — especially because she speaks of a past life where her family were fishermen. What seems odd at first slowly opens into something far more layered: questions of memory, identity, and what we choose to rationalize or dismiss.

Running alongside is the story of Shoma’s nephew, Dinu, and his memories of Tanvoy. This thread adds emotional depth and quiet melancholy, grounding the mystical elements in very human longing and loss.

The pacing is mostly medium and unhurried, allowing the atmosphere to seep in. Chapters 14 to 18 are absolutely gripping — the kind you can’t put down, where everything aligns and the book feels alive in your hands. I did feel the ending was a little rushed, especially after such careful buildup, but it didn’t take away from the emotional impact for me.

This is not a loud book. It doesn’t demand attention — it earns it slowly. And for that reason, Ghost Eye will remain special to me, a story I’ll remember more for how it made me feel than for how it ended.

[Katharine Bubbear · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for providing me with an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

Ghost-Eye is a novel spanning many years - a sweeping story of the uncanny, reincarnation, environmental destruction, and sensory memory. Some characters are able to use memories of past lives as a weapon against industrialisation and planet-destroying “progress”. The plot itself is too complex to detail here, but there are some familiar characters from some of Ghosh’s previous works - including Dinu and Tipu. The pair cooperate to try and unpack Dinu’s aunt, Shoma’s, recollections of an encounter with an extraordinary young girl, Varsha.

I loved the story and the concept. But Ghosh’s choice to use Dinu’s passive voice as the sole narrator - as opposed to Tipu’s rebellious one, or Varsha’s memory-bending one - is a little frustrating. Having said that, Tipu is given such a cod, forced-feeling American ‘accent’ that I would probably find his narration too irritating anyway.

Overall, it’s a wonderful, genre bending novel which forces the reader to ask themselves several important questions: how do we cope, emotionally, with our changing world? How can we possibly feel any optimism for the future, in a world that seems designed to drive loss? And is our only salvation the uniquely human ability to have faith in the super-natural, the divine, the unknowable? Another accomplished, beautifully written work from Ghosh. I’m subtracting a star rating for the narrative voice (and Tipu’s terrible accent). Well worth a place on your 2026 reading list.

[Tania Sarcar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ll admit this was my first Amitav Ghosh book. I had always assumed his writing might be too intellectual for me, so I kept putting it off. Turns out, that was a mistake.
I picked this up from the Meladunix December book box, and once I started, I genuinely couldn’t stop. I finished it in a single day. The writing is immersive and incredibly detailed from scientific names of fish to Buddhist references and cultural nuances that make the world feel alive and textured.
What attracted me most was the subtle supernatural undercurrent running through the story. Ideas of reincarnation, memory, and the unknown are woven in and they sometimes feel unsettling. There were moments that made me uneas and even scared in that quiet, lingering way where you’re unsure what’s real and what isn’t. I wanted to know more, yet part of me was slightly afraid of what I might discover next.
That said, I did wish there was more closure, especially around Varsha’s life. There are gaps and periods we’re not shown and I found myself wanting to know how her story unfolded beyond what’s on the page. The same also applies to some of the other characters, and how they came to be known as "Ghost eyes". Those unanswered spaces stayed with me long after I finished.
Still, this was a book I couldn’t put down. Thought-provoking, atmospheric, and deeply absorbing. A slow surprise that completely won me over and definitely not my last Amitav Ghosh.

[Priyanka M · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a thought-provoking, unsettling read. This novel blends suspense, social insight, and politics, drawing you into a world where surveillance, power, and morality intersect.

The author's writing is spare, evocative, and masterful. He trusts the reader to sit with uncertainty, making the experience more rewarding. The story explores modern anxieties like technology, control, and environmental destruction with a sharp commentary.

The novel's restraint and clarity are striking. Characters like Dr. Shoma Bose are sensitively drawn and the writing on food, memory, and culture is meditative. The author makes cooking an act of remembrance and ecological statement.

What if the planet remembers us, even when we forget it? This novel is a quietly urgent exploration of climate change, grief, and responsibility.

Readers who enjoy literary fiction that's thoughtful, unsettling, and contemporary.

A mix of calm and disturbance and the kind only fine literary fiction leaves behind. It is a novel to read, reflect on, and return to. Highly recommended!

[Uttara Srinivasan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is indeed a pleasure and a conscious choice to begin the year with a Ghosh babu telling. To pick one that explores the role of nature and those to possess a way to connect with nature in the most elemental way, also seems propitious. And so I travelled back in time and again, to Calcutta, the Sunderbans and New York, allowing the author to help me suspend the disbelief that I assume rationality must bring. And the journey I’m true Amitav Ghosh style is rewarding and well timed at the start of a new year that brings new hope and new plans with it

The writing is as always and as I have now come to expect of my favourite author, beautiful, silken and evocative as only masters know how to be.

And I think we get to see a lot of the author and his current journey of environment consciousness - suitable awakening and a slight nudge to believe and to take action. This I must say is so much more effective (for me) all the chest thumping that populist arm chair activism propagates

All said and done, always happy to read an Amitav Ghosh telling and always here to pick the next one up

[Chaitali Jain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some fiction books entertain you,
& then there are those rare ones that answer questions you didn’t even know you were carrying. Ghost Eye felt like that jackpot.

A story that asks life-altering,almost epic questions & somehow answers them without ever sounding heavy or indulgent. Not once did I feel there were filler pages or concepts. Each page made me flip in anticipation to the next!!!

At its heart, the book spans across two timelines, where a mysterious inherited ability to see beyond the visible world connects past and present.

As memories resurface & souls seem to travel across dimensions, the narrative explores reincarnation, unseen realms & humanity’s fragile relationship with nature.

Spanning these timelines with striking clarity, Amitav Ghosh weaves reincarnation, souls existing in another dimension & environmental consciousness into one seamless narrative.

There were moments I had to pause, reread & sit with the ideas he was unfolding & honestly, I loved that about it.

[ناسازگار · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved this for the evocative writing about rural Bengali food, the kinds of fish a villager deep inside the Sunderbans may grow up to be familiar with, and what version of those would be normal for an elite, urban household. Loved the depiction of Savarna disgust towards the normal eating habits of a majority of this country’s population, and the interplay of power, access and food. Loved the description of capitalistic destruction of nature, and how the narrative brute force of ‘development’ is weaponised against the most vulnerable people, who will never partake of it, but must sacrifice their entire way of life to enable it. The magic realist use of the patently absurd as a backdrop for the normalized absurd was interesting, and kept me hooked.

Docked it down to three because I didn’t like how it ended. Beautiful descriptions and delicious narrative just concluding with a hurried up romantic arc, so hurried up it felt abrupt. I am still glad I read this though, because it’s my first Amitava Ghosh and piqued my curiosity for his other, more established novels.

[Rebekka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ghost Eye is written in an extraordinarily thrilling way. Reading it feels less like reading a book and more like watching a slow, haunting film unfold.

The story moves between two timelines, 1969 and 2022, and yet it never feels confusing. It begins in 1969 with a well-settled Marwari family whose quiet life suddenly changes. Everything is normal until three-year-old Varsha starts behaving differently. She craves fish and rice in a strictly vegetarian household and begins speaking fluent Bengali, a language no one around her speaks.

What first feels strange soon becomes unsettling. Doctors are consulted, questions are raised, and slowly the story moves toward something deeper. Varsha speaks of another life, another home, and a death she seems to remember. This is where the idea of reincarnation quietly enters, not as fantasy, but as lived memory.

Years later, in 2022, the story returns through another voice, connecting the past to the present. What happened in 1969 is revisited, reexamined, and slowly understood. The journey takes us through places like the Sundarbans, where land, water, and memory feel alive.

Along the way, the novel blends fiction with real history, touching upon war, displacement, mysterious phenomena, and ecological warnings. Rebirth is not shown as limited to humans. Souls move across forms, carrying awareness and responsibility.

Ghost Eye leaves you slightly bewildered, deeply curious, and quietly reflective. It is not a book that gives answers. It is a book that stays with you.

[Vijai · Rating 3 out of 5]

"A drop of poison in a pot of milk". That's how I felt about this book. Especially one bit about levitation. I can't believe Mr. Ghosh and his team did not catch this. This will not be a spoiler because it has no bearing on the progression of the story. So, here it is, there is a point in the story where our protagonist is discussing the esoteric bits of reincarnation and somehow levitation topic comes up and they pull the example of Subbiah Pullavar, someone who is said to have done it for the first time in front of a camera in 1870 or something.

If Mr. Ghosh had searched TikTok and even Youtube, he would have found that there are literally thousands of how-tos, comedy skits and fake prank videos on this very technique. In the book though, this is presented as some empirical evidence of the other-worldly powers. Thankfully, this happens at around the 80% mark so I was able to finish the rest which unfortunately wasn't much. Mr. Ghosh went Kantara with this story.

This one thing spoiled the entire novel for me.

3 stars for beautiful writing as always.

[Debasruti Mitra · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book was such a whirlwind for me that I completed it within 2 days.
The story of Varsha and Dinu and how reincarnation plays a part in their lives is brought about in such a intricate matter over decades fascinated me.
Flipping through the initial chapters, one could believe that they were transported to Calcutta post independence, and had taken a ferry to Sundarbans.

The latter half of the book speaks about the current environment issues surrounding us and how we can live harmoniously with them if we respect them.
Reincarnation is not just rebirth but how different and vast it can be from what we know educated me and made we wonder that do we even know how our mind, senses work.
Overall this book made me feel if two people are destined to be together, they will find their way to each other by crossing desserts and swimming through tides.

[Deepti Srivatsan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main theme of Ghost-eye revolves around reincarnation and climate change, with a narrative that switches back and forth from the 60s to 2020. I especially enjoyed the nerdy portrayal of Shoma, who obsessively jots down daily notes and rigorously tests the wild idea of reincarnation with scientific methods (Haptic memory, experimenting with different species of fish). Although the concept of reincarnation is outlandish for most, the story makes it seem believable.

What bothered me though was the inconsistencies in the narration. Certain sections felt amateurish, as if sometime else had written them. Still, it remained an engaging read overall.

[Bhavya · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fact that the author chose such a daring theme in itself deserves so much praise. This does have elements from previous books of his but even if you haven’t read those, it won’t distort your understanding of this book.

There were points in the book where I did think he went a little off track or put in juvenile elements, and for that I’ve deducted one star. But the tying up of different timelines together, bringing together the otherworldly and reality, the amount of research to make sure the events of the story align with the actual events which have happened between the 60s and now - I don’t know how he did it.

[Pradyun Sawant · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was a gripping story with many unexpected twists but choosing such a different and to an extent a supernatural or as mentioned in the novel a woo-woo subject is really daring by Amitava. I must congratulate him for making the subject so connecting at the same time keeping the knowledge about it as scientific and spiritual at the same time. I could meet again characters from previous novels and that was special as you start building a bond with them now. A great beginning to a new year with a great novel.

[Chetan (tintin) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was very surprised when this book showed up on my Amazon suggestions.
I love Amitav Ghosh's work , and was very excited to read this one and boy this did not disappoint!
I loved the premise , the characters, the story line and especially the big twist in the end. I didnot expect that coming.
I am glad this book showed up on my Amazon.I quite enjoyed reading this.

ps: i loved the cover of the book as well

[Rishvanth Reddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amitav Ghosh presents a major thesis: the marginalised are under threat due to the exploitative nature of corporations and environmental destruction. The current forms of protest are ineffective against the state and corporations. To save the world, we must remember the old ways. Ghosh envisions using the irruption (you have to read the novel to know what this is about) of people with special abilities, those with ghost-eyes who can see between realms of the real and the invisible, to achieve this feat.

A complex tale overall, with delicate descriptions of landscapes of Sundabans, Calcutta, Brooklyn, and the fish dishes. The moment I finished reading, I wanted to prepare fish curry and think about this novel while I was cooking and eating.

[Sreya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a lovely, magical book. I’m so glad this was my first new read of the year.

Amitav Ghosh is a masterful storyteller, and this book is a reminder of how effortlessly he draws you into a world and holds you there.

Under the surface, the story sits in the space between science and faith, using memory and history to reflect on how the past shows up and shapes the present. And how deeply(and strangely) we’re all connected.

[Yadhu Nandhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was both different and interesting. The author has taken it as a challenge to convince the reader by exploring the uncanny and more than normal occurrences with a scientific eye. The way the mysteries of this book unfolds one by one is really magical with the lives of the characters intersecting in unexpected ways.

However I find the main focus of the novel being shifted more towards the uncanny things rather than towards the motive for which all these things happen.

[Bishkoot · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fantastic book to complete 2025 with! This is the Amitav Ghosh from his Hungry Tide and Calcutta Chromosome days. Ghost Eye has Ghosh bring up a wide range of issues from climate emergencies to dystopic futurities but there is an unmistakable writing style that holds it all from within. I haven't read so breathlessly in a long time; so thankful to end the year with this one.

[Manosij Ghosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very different from his other work but a great read nevertheless.... to enjoy as much as I did one might need and not in that particular order- understanding of cultural references, suspension of disbelief... and an understanding of geography (Bengal/Sunderbans).... for the later one might dive into Hungry Tide (not necessary though)...

[Peri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ghosh’s writing is always evocative, thoroughly enjoyable and well researched. I loved large parts of this book. Other parts felt either rushed or incomprehensible due to the rushing.
A perfectly fun and interesting read regardless from an intuitive story-teller.