The Shadow Lines: From bestselling author and winner of the 2018 Jnanpith Award
Amitav Ghosh's narrator begins as a curious boy, moving fluidly through time via the stories of those around him, untroubled by geography, politics, or chronology. But maturity brings a haunting: a single, apparently senseless act of violence that refuses to leave him alone. Fragments of story, some half-recalled and some wholly invented, gradually assemble themselves into something startling, a vision of human life in which the lines separating people and nations are exposed as nothing more than fiction we've collectively agreed to believe. From this layered mesh of recollection, personal connection, and inherited image, Ghosh constructs a story that is, by turns, sharp and funny, tender and deeply unsettling. It's a novel that interrogates the nation state not with dry argument but with lived experience, treating borders as the arbitrary wounds they are. The most uncomfortable idea it plants is a simple one: the place you call home can, with very little warning, become the thing that threatens you most. Ghosh, a winner of the 2018 Jnanpith Award, writes with a density that rewards patience. You'll find no tidy resolutions here, only a richly observed, quietly radical book that lingers long after the final page.
- Author: Amitav Ghosh
- Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics
- Genre: Historical Fiction
- ISBN: 978-0143448549
- Pages: 288 pages