The Hungry Tide

Product Description

Fom the author of The Glass Palace the widely-acclaimed bestseller The Hungry Tide is a rich exotic saga set in Calcutta & in the vast archipelago of islands in the Bay of Bengal An Indian myth says that when the river Ganges first descended from the heavens the force of the cascade was so great that the earth would have been destroyed if it had not been for the god Shiva who tamed the torrent by catching it in his dreadlocks It is only when the Ganges approaches the Bay of Bengal that it frees itself & separates into thousands of wandering strands The result is the Sundarbans an immense stretch of mangrove forest a half-drowned land where the waters of the Himalayas merge with the incoming tides of the sea It is this vast archipelago of islands that provides the setting for Amitav Ghosh's new novel In the Sundarbans the tides reach more than 100 miles inland & every day thousands of hectares of forest disappear only to re-emerge hours later Dense as the mangrove forests are from a human point of view it is only a little less barren than a desert There is a terrible vengeful beauty here a place teeming with crocodiles snakes sharks & man-eating tigers This is the only place on earth where man is more often prey than predator & it is into this terrain that an eccentric wealthy Scotsman named Daniel Hamilton tried to create a utopian society of all races & religions & conquer the might of the Sundarbans In January 2001 a small ship arrives to conduct an ecological survey of this vast but little-known environment & the scientists on board begin to trace the journeys of the descendants of this society