BookBrowse Reviews The Hungry Tide: Set on the East Coast of India. Novel

Amitav Ghosh, the author of 4 previous novels including The Glass Palace, spent four years researching this book, including living in a small village in the Sundarbans for some weeks. It's a gorgeous book that works on a number of levels - part love story, part political history and part meticulously researched environmental study. As Publishers Weekly puts it, "One doesn't so much read Ghosh's masterful fifth novel as inhabit his characters and the alluring if treacherous Sundarban archipelago."

The starting point for The Hungry Tide was a piece of Ghosh's family history - a century ago a wealthy Scot attempted to set up a Marxist-style utopia on one of the...