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: Fiction, Historical Fiction, India, Literary Fiction, Environment, Indian Literature

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

[Chhavi · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up.

hmmmmmmmmm.
updated review: There certainly is a lot of fish in this novel.
The book moves at a steady clip, sometimes the epoch is uncertain at the start of a chapter; But if not quickly, the timelines do resolve. The story is absolutely fascinating and, as ever, the call to action in the eye of impending climate change is timely. But Ghosh's treatment and/or solution is a bit of a cop-out.

I saw him interviewed (and that's a kind way of describing what actually went down) by a journalist-author in Mumbai who waxed incessantly about fish curry and Ghosh's culinary skills but somehow managed to not ask him HOW and WHY he veered from his scientific bent to examine and accept this path for the tale.

I was dissatisfied with that evening. I was dissatisfied with the end of the book. I'd love to know what other people thought.

[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!!

[Nafisa]

"Trust me: it's not we who choose the myths that guide our lives; it's they who choose us. But once you've been chosen, beware, because they'll always be with you."

Here, I think Amitav Ghosh is speaking to us, his readers. Indeed, the myth of Manasa Devi and the setting of a supernatural Sundarbans are the lores that Ghosh have chosen, or rather, the ones that have chosen him. Luckily, the themes Ghosh deals with here are ones that I am biased towards, as an animist and especially as a Bengali person deeply interested in local folklore. To those less inclined, this might feel like Ghosh is writing the same book over and over again. Still, this was incredibly readable.

[Saumya Singh · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Aakriti · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had me hooked because of the premise but it meanders somewhere in the second half and the entire idea of reincarnates assembling to fight off a conglomerate to save the environment was a bit unnecessary and too rushed. The revelation at the end was supposed to be but it gave me the ick. Love story between an otter reincarnated and a little girl lol what a joke. I understand the whole ecological activisim aspect of the story line but that just felt disjointed and rushed. And the character of Tipu was mind-numbingly irritating. I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes everytime he had a dialogue. Why did he talk like that?

[Mridula Gupta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ghost-Eye is set across two timelines, beginning in 1969 Calcutta and unfolding into the pandemic-era present, with Kolkata remaining the narrative and emotional anchor throughout. The novel opens with Varsha, a three-year-old girl in a wealthy Marwari vegetarian household, who insists she remembers a previous life marked by poverty, fishing, rice cultivation, and survival by the river. Her demand for fish, trivial on the surface, initiates a deeper conflict around memory, belonging, and cultural boundaries.

Varsha’s case is taken seriously by Shoma, a psychiatrist studying reincarnation, and Monty, a paediatrician, who subject her memories to practical testing, particularly through food and everyday knowledge. These investigations suggest that Varsha’s recollections are precise and embodied, eventually pointing toward a past life in present-day Bangladesh. Around this central narrative, the novel incorporates histories of Partition, displacement, Burmese migration, Bangladeshi crossings, political unrest in Calcutta, Cold War anxieties, and later the constraints of the COVID pandemic.

The book places psychological inquiry alongside folk belief systems and myth without clearly privileging one over the other. Burmese nats, the goddess Manasa, visions, prophecies, and individuals with unusual perceptual abilities coexist with psychiatry, environmental activism, and historical realism. As the narrative progresses, the focus shifts toward the Sundarbans, where ecological degradation and industrial intrusion threaten land and water that are treated as both sacred and communal.

One element that felt less convincing was the reincarnation link involving Dinu, which appeared overly constructed in order to reinforce connections between characters. While this choice aligns with the novel’s broader ecological and metaphysical framework, it weakens the internal logic of the narrative at key moments.

Overall, Ghost-Eye functions as environmental fiction grounded in history, myth, and memory, using layered timelines and belief systems to explore the consequences of disrupting ecological and cultural continuity. Despite moments of repetition and narrative excess, the novel remains ambitious in scope and intent, offering a sustained meditation on land, displacement, and the persistence of the past.

[S Ashok · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this novel, Amithav Gosh explores what lies beyond our world of reason. Is there anything beyond what we experience and understand it through reason. Through a life of a girl who is recollecting memories from past life, Gosh explores whether this mysticism could be used to save this planet in peril facing an environmental catastrophe.
Another theme that is recurring is to knowing things holistically, comprehending the world beyond reason, using intuition to arrive at different meaning to our lives. The lives of distinct individuals separated by space, time and cultural are united in a way that this work brings out brilliantly.

[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.

[Riddhi Kishnadwala · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just finished Ghost Eye and honestly, Amitav Ghosh just has a way of making you feel like the air in the room has gotten colder.
​This isn't your typical jump-scare horror story. It’s more of a "creeping realization" kind of book. It follows a character stuck between modern life and some really heavy family/historical secrets. Ghosh blends science and folklore so smoothly that by the end, you’re kind of questioning what’s actually real.

[Srushti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Supremely readable, finished in a day- the overlaps in some places are incredulous but that’s a part of Ghosh’s storytelling I suppose. The themes are married together well but the irruption and fighting against crony capitalism story arc was a bit on the nose I felt. Other than that magical realism and overlapping of different worlds-material and otherwise- was wonderful

[Vaibhav Srivastav · Rating 2 out of 5]

It feels weird to see one of your favourite authors spiral down (so to speak), a lot of writing in this book is deeply self indulgent and childish. There is a surfeit of coincidence and an excess of suspension of disbelief. I thought Gun Island was an exception but this new book is making me wary of Amitav Ghosh's writings.

[Simran · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 actually! 🥹❤️

[Ananya Sarkar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amusing but not the best Amitav Ghosh work by a mile.

[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.

[nandana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I definitely liked this more than Gun Island, and was hella hooked. but also felt it was extremely rushed, and didn't have the attention to detail that drew me to his writing in his older novels. i'm just sad because i was super excited for this.

[Abhinav Radhakrishnan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Themes of collective consciousness and “cases of the reincarnation type” (The Secret of Secrets, and Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam). Easy, flowing read that pulls you along once you begin. My first by Amitav Ghosh, sparked my interest in exploring his other works. Gentle references to fishes of the Sundarban and the vivid, evocative images of Bengal brought to life.

[May · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first Amitav Ghosh book and I could see their love for Bengal and Nature. It's a highlight of how climate change is affecting us. The book goes on to magical realism to solve a crisis and through it explores the 1960s Bengal. Overall enjoyed the book

[Anusha Shekar · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had me wishing I grew up in Kolkata in the 1960s and has driven me slightly mad with cravings for fish preparations I've never even eaten. The plot, however, is quite weak and the ending is quite anti-climactic for all the buildup

[Sehej · Rating 4 out of 5]

Initially gave this three stars because I thought the writing was simple and the plot convenient but I cannot stop thinking about the idea of a veil between our world and others and how it thins during catastrophe…

[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.

[Almas Shamim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ghost-Eye
by Amitava Ghosh
⭐⭐

My first and sadly, last Amitava Ghosh read.
Now I don't consider myself an audience for Ghosh's books...just by the blurbs of his previous works. But... The primary theme of the book is reincarnation. So expecting a nice magical realism I picked it up. But, God, was I disappointed!

Summarising the main cons of the book:
1. Too Much- it starts with what looks like an attempt to give scientific explanations for reincarnation- which is all good, but soon falls back on pure "woo woo" (as the book mentions in one place) with some reincarnated people not only able to see the past but also the future..this main reincarnated girl can also project herself in different places (so, it's not a soul ka punarjanam but just a consciousness which is able to move in both directions of time..and space). And finally the book also brings in metempsychosis which (I learnt in this book) is reincarnation of animal as human (or vice versa). I mean pleeez!
Not that I find any of these ideas unbelievable... I mean I am a crazy woman with crazy beliefs, trust me. And reincarnation into different species is actually included in the larger Hindu philosophy (and as the book clarifies even by other sources including Plato) But all of this happening in the same story is just too much for me.


2. Too Many: What are the chances of you coming across a punarjanam case or someone who is prophetic or gets visions etc? you may know 1 person here and 1 person known to someone's someone. Right? I mean there's a reason why this falls in the realm of supernatural. Were such phenomena as common as in this book, they'd be considered only natural... nothing supernatural about them. In this story there are 2 individuals who are reincarnated- one of whom has a 'ghost eye' . Then one of the main characters who didn't have any abilities until very old, is resuscitated back after a heart attack and now also has a ghost eye. One of her friend's brothers is also a ghost eye. A helper working in this old lady's house is yet another ghost-eye. I mean c'mon!

3. Co-incidences galore: When Shoma (old lady mentioned above, but in this part she is still young) wants to research about fish, her FIL's library has a book about fishes from the Sunderbans where she gets to know EVERYTHING about them. When she needs to find a certain place, her FIL's library has a book with Sunderban's maps and geographical details. The narrator, Dinu, happens to find a single paper of a file which was categorically burnt.. and that single paper gives him a major clue. Dinu, when he has to cook Bengali fish in NY finds it - his friend's student's cousin has a shop with specific fish varieties.... read that again.. Narrator's friend's student's cousin. Mere zindagi mei yaha ek bhi jan nahi hai... shauhar bhi dusre sheher jakar baitha hai... aur is bhaisaab ke zindagi mei log nahi khatam ho rahe.
And honestly, the coincidence bit was so jarring. It felt like very amateur writing... again chhota muh badi baat. I am a nobody. ..and Amitava Ghosh is Amitava Ghosh... But seriously? Log yeh padhke fida ho rahe hai?

4. Forced themes: I know 1 or 2 of his previous works were centred around environment. And this one could have well been that just with the reincarnation bit. But the part which covers the reincarnated child's later life has been forcefully adapted to align with conservation/envt.activism.

5. Forgettable characters: All of them. Nothing makes the characters likeable or relatable. But special mention for Tipu who only ever appears on calls but is just so... knife-scratching-on-a-steel-plate kind of irritating.

6. Diaspora: pet peeve...I don't like diaspora stories. I knew that about Amitava Ghosh hence was never keen on reading him but here he was...writing on a supernatural topic.

Summarising the Pros:
1. At some point, the book ends.

I don't want to spend any more time reviewing this book. Suffice it to say that it was not meant for me and I wasn't meant for it. I'm sure there are people out there who'd be mind blown by this story. Good for them. Saprem Namaskar. 🙏🏽

[Dr. Prachi]

I just finished my first book of the year. I started the year reading multiple books at the same time (which I usually don't do), but this time I just followed my mood and picked up whatever felt right.
And here I am again, going back to Ghosh's stories. It wouldn't be wrong to say his books are like a magnet to me. I'm always drawn back to them. The way he builds his world makes it feel less like reading and more like slipping into someone else's life. For a while, Im not just reading the story. Im inside it, living every moment.
Maybe that is why the timing felt ironic. Just when I was getting lost in fictional worlds, I had been trying so hard to stay firmly disciplined in my real one. I've been training myself so strictly these days. Sleep early, wake up early, disciplined routine, almost monk mode living. And then there was a day when life decided to test my sincerity with a midnight layover.
There I was at some ungodly hour, half asleep, half alive. The kind of night where my soul seemed to have already left my body. I was there physically, but internally, gone. Floating somewhere above Gate, whatever it was.
And in that exact dramatic setting, I'm reading Ghost-Eye... Okay fine, let's just say a very atmospheric novel by Amitav Ghosh, because apparently my exhausted brain thought, Yes, ghosts at 1 a.m. sound perfect.
As if scripted by the universe, a cute guy walks up, notices the book in my hand, and says he's reading Amitav Ghosh too. Of all the books, of all the authors, of all the airports in the world.
We start talking. Literature at midnight. Sleep deprived philosophy. Turns out he's a student of social politics, and somehow our conversations about Ghosh's writing spiral into discussions on geopolitics, then to Shashi Tharoor, then to another topic, and another, one thought seamlessly unfolding into the next. That comfortable kind of conversation you don't expect with a stranger. And then somewhere in the conversation, I mention Im a mother of two. The disbelief on his face. He just looks at me and refuses to believe it. He genuinely thought that was my most creative excuse to push him away. As if I panicked and thought, Quick, what's the most effective exit line? Oh yes, two children. I almost wanted to show him my phone gallery as proof. Imagine being so sleep deprived, so ghost-like, reading about ghosts, and the most unbelievable thing in the whole scene is that I have two kids. I almost laughed. I mean, me fabricating two entire human beings just to escape small talk at Gate 28.
There was something oddly touching about it. In that half ghost state of mine, someone saw me only as this woman with a book in her hand at midnight. Not the routine Im fixing. Not the responsibilities I carry. Not the children waiting back home.
By the time I finally reached home in the early hours of the morning, the house was quiet. I dropped my bag softly. Walked into my room and saw my kids asleep.
That same night.
At the airport, I was just a stranger in transit, defined only by the book in my hand.
At home, two little hearts beat peacefully, trusting the world because I am here.
Same me.
Different worlds.
Life really is just chapters overlapping. Sometimes you're the ghost in transit, sometimes you're the anchor waiting at home. And with whatever was left of my soul with me, the whole thing felt surreal.


-said she🤍🕊️
-Copyright ©Prachi, 2026

[Dharmendra · Rating 4 out of 5]

What if one day your child demands to eat fish in a strictly vegetarian household — and insists it is not a whim, but a memory?

This unsettling question opens Ghost-Eye on 20 September 1969, in Calcutta, when a three-year-old girl disturbs her Marwari family by claiming she remembers another life : one shaped by rivers, fish, and a different mother altogether. What initially appears as a domestic anomaly soon unfolds into a narrative that is expansive, layered, and deeply unsettling in its implications.

To contain the disturbance, Shoma Bose, a psychologist trained in rational inquiry, is brought in to diagnose and explain the child’s claims. Her role is crucial, not because she “solves” the mystery, but because she embodies the novel’s central tension: the limits of scientific reason when confronted with memory, belief, and inherited knowledge. As Shoma listens, observes, and doubts, the novel quietly questions what kinds of truth modern frameworks are willing to accept — and what they instinctively dismiss.

The story is narrated by Dinu, whose life moves between Kolkata and Brooklyn, between intimacy and distance, history and aftermath. Through Dinu’s reflective voice, Ghost-Eye becomes less about uncovering a single truth and more about tracing connections across time, geography, and consciousness. His own experiences of displacement and return echo the novel’s broader concerns with fractured identities and lingering pasts.

One of the most striking aspects of the novel is how food especially fish operates as a symbolic fault line. The demand for fish is not merely about diet; it exposes deep cultural, ecological, and social divisions. Fish becomes a marker of riverine life, of the Sundarbans, of communities whose survival is inseparable from water and ecology. What is seen as transgressive in one household is essential in another. Through this seemingly ordinary detail, Ghosh illuminates questions of caste, belonging, memory, and environmental dependence.

Running quietly yet insistently through the novel is the presence of Manasa Devi, whose mythology forms the invisible thread binding the characters. Whether through folklore, fear, or faith, Manasa anchors the narrative, suggesting that mythology is not ornamental but foundational: a living system of meaning that continues to shape how people understand disaster, survival, and continuity.

The thematic density of Ghost-Eye is striking. Environment, climate change, mystery, identity, mythology, political history, and capitalism coexist within its pages, not as isolated concerns but as interlinked forces. The Sundarbans emerge as more than a setting; they are a living, threatened landscape where ecological collapse, economic exploitation, and cultural erasure intersect. Ghosh refuses to frame climate change as a purely contemporary crisis, instead revealing it as the cumulative result of historical neglect and extractive systems.

Reading Ghost-Eye felt especially personal, I read a signed copy by Amitav Ghosh , which perhaps made me linger longer over its silences as much as its arguments.

Ambitious, dense, and deliberately unruly, Ghost-Eye mirrors the world it depicts fragmented, entangled, and held together by stories we may not fully understand, but cannot afford to ignore.

[Rahul Vishnoi · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

Quote Alert
"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.

[Randhir Prasad · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first read of Amitav Ghosh! (yes actually true! Please excuse me, I am a new reader.) From my personal experience I can happily advice anyone wanting to start reading Amitav Ghosh to start with this book.

 

Regarding Ghosh's general writing; I was told that it is complex, there’s prominent use of polyphonic narratives, including use of multiple voices across different timelines and different geographies. I was told his prose is generally dense, well researched, which demands the reader to pay more attention. After knowing all these details, I was expecting the read to be not a very easy one; I was expecting to take more time, more effort to go through the book, but surprisingly that was not the case. Quite contrastingly, the book reads absolutely smoothly, it’s a proper “page turner”.  Themes of past life remembrance, environmental awareness, traditional culinary practices, culinary skills guided by haptic senses, ichthyology come together in this neatly spread out story.

Much of the novel is told in two narratives: The first narrative is set in Kolkata in the late1960’s where a psychologist Dr. Shoma Bose, is dealing with a ‘case of the reincarnation type’ where in a three year old three girl child Varsha born into a strictly vegetarian Marwari household, remembers a past life where she was a fisherwoman from the Sunderbans and consumed fishes, and now demands for the same food.  The second narrative is set in present day Brooklyn where the protagonist Deenanath Dutta (Deenu), who is Dr. Shoma Bose’s nephew now pieces together fragments of the past, of this very case, that his aunt once worked on, for a perceived present day environmental benefit.

The book has strong themes of magical realism, upon which it rides through all the difficult curves effortlessly. Through most of it’s length the book reads most smoothly, the story almost flows like water; but there is point in the second half where the flow staggers. It’s when the first narrative set in late 1960’s Kolkata concludes, and further continuation of the story depends completely on the second narrative. The storytelling hits a rough patch here, plot developments start happening just for the sake of happening. But this rough patch doesn’t last very long; the narrative soon picks up and actually ends on a convincing note.

The book delivers satisfyingly on most of what it promises and makes the reader actively think about all it’s diverse themes. I found myself looking up all the fish species that have been mentioned in the book, looking up through all the different Bengali fish delicacies that have been meticulously explained in the book. The book did stimulate my gastronomical senses for sure.

Time to explore more works of Amitav Ghosh!

[Prathyush Sambaturu · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the last decade, I have read many novels and nonfiction works of Amitav Ghosh and constantly look out for his new releases. Last year I was fortunate to meet him, this time at Oxford, for the second time (1st time in Charlottesville) at his book signing for Wild Fictions: Essays recently. At the end of the year, during my visit to Kolkata, I stumbled upon his new novel and grabbed a copy eagerly. I was waiting to read another of his novels after reading a series of nonfiction works. Below I am penning down my thoughts on this book immediately after finishing it. I might later revise this review.

This book is a unique mix of various genres that include historical fiction, psychological thriller, magical realism, and a unique blend of some memorable characters and places from Ghosh's previous novels. Those who read The Hungry Tide, Gun Island, and even The Glass Palace would go through some lines in this book and go back to those novels. Particularly, for me, the connection of this story to both University of Virginia (where I got my PhD) and Charlottesville gave the story a personal grounding.

This work is a page-turner and a walk through memory lane for readers of Ghosh. It brings the issue of climate change and the related migration to the fore. The story moves geographically between Brooklyn, Kolkata, and the Sunderbans, and temporally between the 1960s and 2020s, while the present part of the story engulfs the COVID pandemic and beyond.

Finally, coming to the title, the Ghost-eyes seem to be such people who are intimately connected to their surroundings and transcend across life-death-rebirth cycles (assuming such exist) to protect the nature that nurtured them. A message from Ghosh seems to be to look for solutions to climate change within the location of impact. As the people who are native to a place, who live on the land and natural resources, might have a better understanding of their surroundings. He suggests through this story that this is a better approach than neglecting local communities and trying to impose one-fit-for-all kinds of solutions everywhere.

This book is a page-turner and makes a gripping read. I am a bit disappointed with the denouement. One of the main plot lines running through the story unfolds in a rather unexciting manner. This is rather uncharacteristic of Ghosh's novels, where the denouement is typically the most exciting part. I found this still an enjoyable read due to the satisfactory closure of other themes.

**TL;DR** Another of Ghosh's novels that spans across decades and historical timeframes, which makes a great read. Not among the pick of his works for me, but one I would still recommend reading.

[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.

[Sherry · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beauty this book is, AN ABSOLUTE DELIGHT.

This is gonna blow your mind. It's psychology, science, religion, ecology, environment, etc all wrapped in one. Its basis is magical realism but also not in entirety, i will tell you why:

As devout hindus, we are made to believe that reincarnations happen, even our Gods reincarnated. We are also made to believe that there is some other world from which we carry our Karmas with us or from our past lives so we have to pay our dues and when certain things happen which are apparently meant to happen that simply means we have a higher purpose in life.

This is exactly what happened in this book, a girl dies and she's believed to be reborn, reincarnated to serve some higher purpose. What happens flawlessly in this book is that we get to witness the portals opening from other realms, people communicating through it, the confluence of science (psychology) and religion and then some physical, metaphysical matters.

Varsha's and Dinu's life is entwined with each other. From the late sixties Calcutta to present day Brooklyn, the book paves its way with intricate detailing and precision. As readers we get to know about all the major events that took place in the last couple of decades in the name of environment change and ecological imbalance in the Sundarbans and the world, it's that crisp.

Also the author has tried to portray Bengal which we usually don't get to know about, the people living on the island, in the forests surrounding Sundarbans, the wide variety of fauna specially the fishes. It's more than what meets the eye.

What's interesting about this book is the ongoing debate but with proper explanations as to what stands correct science or religion. As Dr. Bose, a renowned psychologist herself believed that there are things which happen and are beyond human understanding.

"Carl Jung believed that "coincidence" was not a useful word — he preferred to use the term "synchronicity". And the curious thing about synchronicities is that they tend to occur in clusters."

The book is addictive, it will keep you hooked and the writing is immaculate.

[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.