With Ghost-Eye, Amitav Ghosh presents a thoroughly gratifying return to the full-form novel, his first since 2019's Gun Island. In 1969, three-year-old Varsha Gupta--"a pretty, cherubic girl" already bilingual in the Hindi of her privileged Calcutta family and the Bengali of her caregiver--slaps away her ayah's hand ready to feed her, demanding, "I want rice-and-fish. Give me some fish." The impossible request in this strictly vegetarian Marwari household leads to a shocking revelation: Varsha can remember her past life with another mother, living along a river where they regularly caught and ate fish. Varsha's pediatrician is called, but Dr. Monty Bose finds nothing physically amiss and suggests the family consult his wife, Shoma, "a highly qualified therapist and psychologist... [who] has dealt with several cases of... children who remember past lives."
A half-century later, as the world shuts down "during the plague year of 2020," Indian-born Brooklynite Dinu can't return to Calcutta to now-octogenarian Shoma, his maternal aunt with whom Dinu spent the first six months of his life while his mother recovered from "serious postpartum complications"; the rest of his youth was shared between the two sister-mothers. Dinu is Shoma's closest relative, a responsibility he bears with gratitude, affection, and deep love. Meanwhile, Tipu, the "semi-adopted son" of his marine biologist friend Piya Roy, is back in India to run an environmental trust in the Sundarbans and urgently needs Dinu's help with information involving Shoma's mysterious 1969 visit there. And so the narrative threads align, crisscrossing for revelatory connections.
While Ghost-Eye stands alone, Ghosh's faithful readers will thrill to make connections to previous titles. Dinanath "Dinu" Datta, who preferred the more American-sounding Deen in Gun Island, narrates here. Returning, too, is Dinu's "not my girlfriend" Piya from Gun Island and 2006's The Hungry Tide; Tipu and his partner, Rafi, also play central roles. Additional familiar faces include Sundarbans protector Nilima Bose, local Lusibari ferryman Horen Naskar, and The Glass Palace's protagonist Rajkumar Raha. Such reappearances seem fitting in a narrative centering reincarnation.
Moving seamlessly between decades, Ghosh (The Ibis Trilogy) intertwines family, sociopolitical history, capitalism, environmental crises, and a myriad of (sur)realities. Always an exceptional storyteller, he brilliantly combines what can be touched and seen with the documented otherworldly--the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies, the psychological phenomenon of "announcing dreams," as examples. Regardless of any lingering doubts from skeptics, Ghosh gifts a magnificent story ready to be believed, appreciated, and celebrated. --Terry Hong
Shelf Talker: Amitav Ghosh's Ghost-Eye brilliantly centers reincarnation to connect strangers, families, and the environment across the world.