Ghost-Eye: A Novel

Summary

Varsha Gupta wants fish for lunch. Her family is shocked; the three-year-old has never tasted fish in her life. The Guptas are strict vegetarians and don’t allow it inside their Calcutta mansion. But Varsha claims she can remember another life, one in a mud house by a river where she caught and cooked fish with a different mother.

Perplexed, the Guptas consult with Dr. Shoma Bose, a psychologist who has been investigating what are known as “cases of the reincarnation type” for years. But what Varsha reveals will transform even Dr. Bose’s understanding of the border between past and present.

Half a century later, Varsha’s case file catches the attention of a group of environmental activists, and Dr. Bose’s nephew Dinu is drawn inexorably into their plans. Varsha’s special abilities might be just what they need to prevent the destruction of one of India’s last remaining wildernesses—and as Dinu is caught up in the search for Varsha, buried memories of his own past begin to surface.

Traveling between late-1960s Calcutta and present-day Brooklyn, Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye is an urgent and expansive novel from one of our greatest living tellers of stories about family, fate, and our fragile planet.

“Metempsychosis, reincarnation—Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye challenges you to believe, and on the way engages you with a gripping story of youth and self-knowledge.”—Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of Theft and Afterlives