Ghosh

Editor's Note: A fiction spanning over years, Gun Island, written by Amitav Ghosh follows the journey of Deen Dutta, a dealer of rare books, whose quiet world is turned upside down as a strange turn of events makes him embark on a journey from India to Los Angeles, via Venice. Weaving old folklores with modern-day adventures, Ghosh again tries to draw readers attention towards climate change, as he did in his previous book, The Great Derangement and many others. Gun Island has some remarkable women characters too and with…

Amitav Ghosh is a remarkably forward-looking writer. His latest novel Gun Island is a read for the new world. Though the book revolves around present issues that threaten our future, the writer has not given to despair yet. Despite the planetary destruction, chaos and the resultant suffering, he is hopeful. We sit at Mumbai’s iconic Taj Mahal Palace on a sultry afternoon and discuss it all—his latest book, Jnanpith win, friendships with Ram Chandra Guha and Vikram Seth, his love for the Sunderbans, fascination with…

How do you capture the realities of climate change in a novel — not just its causes and symptoms, but the ever-changing, ever-weirder ways it is manifesting, within the conventional framework of a story with a beginning, middle and end? Answering that question is, according to the writer Amitav Ghosh, the literary world’s great challenge. “I feel completely convinced that we have to change our fictional practices in order to deal with the world that we’re in,” he said. “Something this big and this important,…