Gun Island
CBC Books | | Posted: August 20, 2019 6:02 PM | Last Updated: August 22, 2019
Amitav Ghosh
On a visit to his birthplace, Kolkata, a Brooklyn-based dealer in rare books finds his life becoming entangled with an ancient legend about the goddess of snakes, Manasa Devi. While visiting a temple, deep within the vast mangrove forests of Bengal, he has a disturbing encounter with the most feared, and revered, of Indian snakes, a king cobra. This is followed by a series of increasingly uncanny episodes that seem to dissolve the borders of the human and non-human.
Peopled with a diverse cast of characters, and set in places that range from the Sundarbans to Los Angeles and Venice, this is a story about a world in which creatures and beings of every kind have been torn loose from their accustomed homes by the catastrophic processes of displacement that are now unfolding across the Earth, at an ever-increasing pace. It is also a story about a man whose faith in the world is restored by two remarkable women. (From Hamish Hamilton)
Peopled with a diverse cast of characters, and set in places that range from the Sundarbans to Los Angeles and Venice, this is a story about a world in which creatures and beings of every kind have been torn loose from their accustomed homes by the catastrophic processes of displacement that are now unfolding across the Earth, at an ever-increasing pace. It is also a story about a man whose faith in the world is restored by two remarkable women. (From Hamish Hamilton)
Gun Island is available in Sept. 2019.
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. His books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace and The Calcutta Chromosome.
From the book
The strangest thing about this strange journey was that it was launched by a word – and not an unusually resonant one either but a banal, commonplace coinage that is in wide circulation, from Cairo to Calcutta. That word is bundook, which means 'gun' in many languages, including my own mother tongue, Bengali (or Bangla). Nor is the word a stranger to English: by way of British colonial usages it found its way into the Oxford English Dictionary, where it is glossed as 'rifle'.
But there was no rifle or gun in sight the day the journey began; nor indeed was the word intended to refer to a weapon. And that, precisely, was why it caught my attention: because the gun in question was a part of a name – 'Bonduki Sadagar', which could be translated as 'the Gun Merchant'.
From Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh ©2018. Published by Hamish Hamilton.