Amitav Ghosh Knihy

Ghoshova cesta do starobylé země začala v knihovně Oxfordské univerzity, kde při hledání materiálů ke své disertační práci narazil na edici středověké obchodní korespondence, kterou z rukopisů nalezených v geníze káhirské synagogy vydal arabista Šlomo Dov Goitein. Kniha Ve starobylé zemi, která vyšla poprvé roku 1992, spojuje dva příběhy: autorovo autobiografické vyprávění, či vzpomínky z terénního výzkumu (1980-81 a 1988) a historickou rekonstrukci života kupce Ben Jica a jeho otroka Bommy, jehož postava se stává autorovým alter egem. Fascinuje ho na ní už samotná skutečnost, že se tak nevýznamná postava stala shodou náhod součástí psané historie, ale zejména kulturní propustnost světa, v němž on i jeho pán žili.

The International Bestseller from the Man Booker Prize shortlisted author 'An absorbing story of a world in transition' JM Coetzee 'A Doctor Zhivago for the Far East' The Independent Rajkumar is only another boy, helping on a market stall in the dusty square outside the royal palace, when the British force the Burmese King, Queen and all the Court into exile. He is rescued by the far-seeing Chinese merchant, and with him builds up a logging business in upper Burma. But haunted by his vision of the Royal Family, he journeys to the obscure town in India where they have been exiled. The story follows the fortunes - rubber estates in Malaya, businesses in Singapore, estates in Burma - which Rajkumar, with his Chinese, British and Burmese relations, friends and associates, builds up - from 1870 through the Second World War to the scattering of the extended family to New York and Thailand, London and Hong Kong in the post-war years.

Off the easternmost coast of India lies the immense archipelago of tiny islands known as the Sundarbans. Life here is precarious, ruled by the unforgiving tides and the constant threat of attack by Bengal tigers. Into this place of vengeful beauty come two seekers from different worlds, whose lives collide with tragic consequences. The settlers of the remote Sundarbans believe that anyone without a pure heart who ventures into the watery island labyrinth will never return. With the arrival of two outsiders from the modern world, the delicate balance of small community life uneasily shifts. Piya Roy is a marine biologist, of Indian descent but stubbornly American, in search of a rare dolphin. Kanai Dutt is an urbane Delhi businessman, here to retrieve the journal of his uncle who died mysteriously in a local political uprising. When Piya hires an illiterate but proud local fisherman to guide her through the crocodile-infested backwaters, Kanai becomes her translator. From this moment, the tide begins to turn. A contemporary story of adventure and romance, identity and history, The Hungry Tide travels deep into one of the most fascinating regions on earth, where the treacherous forces of nature and human folly threaten to destroy a way of life.

From the bestselling author of the Ibis trilogy and The Great Derangement, The Nutmeg's Curse is an enthralling, panoramic history of the influence of colonialism on the world today, told through the surprising story of the nutmeg.

It is 1839 and tension has been rapidly mounting between China and British India following the crackdown on opium smuggling by Beijing. With no resolution in sight, the colonial government declares war.One of the vessels requisitioned for the attack, the Hind, travels eastwards from Bengal to China, sailing into the midst of the First Opium War. The turbulent voyage brings together a diverse group of travellers, each with their own agenda to pursue. Among them is Kesri Singh, a sepoy in the East India Company who leads a company of Indian sepoys; Zachary Reid, an impoverished young sailor searching for his lost love, and Shireen Modi, a determined widow en route to China to reclaim her opium-trader husband's wealth and reputation. Flood of Fire follows a varied cast of characters from India to China, through the outbreak of the First Opium War and China's devastating defeat, to Britain's seizure of Hong Kong.

Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements. Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.

Novelist and journalist Ghosh has offered firsthand accounts of pivotal world events over the past twenty years. He is an essential voice in forums like The Nation, the New York Times, the New Republic, Granta, and The New Yorker. This book brings together the finest of these pieces for the first time--including many never before published in the U.S.--in a compelling chronicle of the turmoil of our times. In his travels he has walked amid the devastation of the 2004 tsunami, stood on an icy mountaintop on the contested border between India and Pakistan, interviewed Pol Pot's sister-in-law in Cambodia, shared the elation of Egyptians when Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize, and stood with his threatened Sikh neighbors through the riots following Indira Gandhi's assassination. With intelligence and authentic sympathy, he "illuminates the human drama behind the headlines" (Publishers Weekly). Incendiary Circumstances is testimony of an era defined by the ravages of politics and nature.--From publisher description.

A beautifully illustrated fable from Booker-shortlisted author

A stunningly vibrant novel from Amitav Ghosh, author of the internationally acclaimed bestseller The Glass Palace

The sequel to the bestselling, Booker-shortlisted, Sea of Poppies.