Ghost-eye: A Novel
When three-year-old Varsha Gupta starts demanding fish for lunch, her family is baffled. She's never eaten it. She's never even been allowed near it. Her household is strictly vegetarian, and yet here she is, insisting she remembers a previous life: a mud house beside a river, a different mother, the smell of fish frying on a stove. It's an opening that quietly unsettles you, and Ghosh knows exactly what he's doing with it. The Guptas seek out Dr Shoma Bose, a psychiatrist who has spent years studying what researchers call 'cases of the reincarnation type'. Shoma arrives expecting to assess Varsha. What she doesn't expect is for the child's account to upend her own sense of how the world works. That shift, private and irreversible, sits at the heart of the novel. The story then jumps forward fifty years. Varsha's old case file has come to the attention of a circle of environmental activists, and Shoma's nephew Dinu finds himself pulled into their orbit. As he searches for Varsha, his own buried past begins to stir. The narrative moves between late-sixties Calcutta and present-day Brooklyn with confidence, holding both timelines in careful balance. Ghosh writes with the kind of controlled urgency that makes you read faster without quite realising it. Ghost-Eye touches on family bonds, the weight of fate, and the precarious state of the natural world. It's a rich, unsettling, quietly political novel from a writer at the height of his powers.
- Author: Amitav Ghosh
- Publisher: Fourth Estate India
- Genre: Contemporary Fiction
- ISBN: 978-9373073439
- Pages: 336 pages