Amitav Ghosh - Böcker

I centrum för denna storslagna roman står skeppet Ibis och dess passagerare. Deeti är änka till en opiummissbrukare, räddad från makens begravningsbål av den lågkastiga Kalua. Paulette är den föräldralösa dottern till en fransk botaniker och Jodu, sonen till hennes amma, hennes enda länk till det förflutna. Vi får följa dem på deras väg till Mauritius i detta mästerverk av Amitav Ghosh.

"En våg av eld" är den tredje delen i amitav Ghoshs  hyllade Ibis-trilogi. Året är 1839 och spänningen har snabbt ökat mellan Kina och Storbritannien. Plötsligt förklarar britterna – som vill tvinga Kina att köpa opium – krig. Ett av fartygen som rekvirerats för attacken, Hinden, reser österut från Bengalen i brittiska Indien till Kina och seglar in mitt i det första opiumkriget. På båten finns indiern Kesri Singh, som slåss för Ostindiska kompaniet; Zachary Reid, en amerikansk ung sjöman som vill göra en klassresa genom att sälja opium, och Shireen Modi, en målmedveten parsisk änka som vill återta sin opiumhandlande mans tillgångar och återupprätta hans rykte. I "En våg av eld" får vi följa dem, och flera andra karaktärer från de två första delarna, under inledningen av första opiumkriget. Under striderna och fortsatt spelar skeppet Ibis en viktig roll i historien. Amitav Ghoshs Ibistrilogi är ett mästerverk om den koloniala historia som än idag gör sig påmind i vår samtida världsordning.

Den andra delen i Amitav Ghoshs mäktiga romanbygge om migration och kolonial handel, Ibis-trilogin, utspelar sig på Mauritius och i Kanton. Vi får följa karaktärerna från den första delen under de händelser som leder fram till det första opiumkriget och britternas övertagande av Hong Kong. Amitav Ghosh (f 1956) är en av Indiens mest kända författare. Ghosh växte upp i Calcutta, Bangladesh och Sri Lanka, och utbildade sig vid universiteten i Delhi, Alexandria och har en doktorsexamen i socialantropologi. Ghosh har skrivit ett antal prisbelönade romaner som tematiskt kretsar kring migration, identitet och, de sneaste åren, klimatförändringen.På svenska finns tidigare Öarna ( Palaver press, 2020), essäsamlingen Den stora galenskapen - klimatförändringen och det otänkbara ( Palaver press 2020), och Ett hav av vallmo ( första delen i Ibis-trilogin)utgiven på Palaver 2021.

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.

Har vi blivit galna? Den indiske författaren Amitav Ghosh menar att framtida generationer mycket väl kan dra den slutsatsen. I den hyllade essäboken Den stora galenskapen undersöker han vår kulturella och politiska oförmåga att förstå klimatförändringarnas våldsamhet och omfattning. Andre och reviderade upplagan.

'This shape-shifting, time-stitching novel grants us special kinds of double-vision: across eras and between species. Under its spell, Amitav Ghosh helps us begin to live multiple lives - to become aware of the porosity and mystery of being, rather than of its fortifications and frontiers' Robert Macfarlane, author of Is a River Alive?Calcutta, September 1969Varsha Gupta wants fish for her lunch. Her family can't understand it; 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, a mud house by a river where she caught and cooked fish with a different mother.Perplexed, the Guptas turn to Dr. Shoma Bose, a psychiatrist who has been investigating what are known as 'cases of the reincarnation type' for years. But her understanding of the world is changed forever by Varsha's revelations.Half a century later, Varsha's therapeutic case file catches the attention of a group of environmental activists, and Shoma's nephew Dinu is drawn inexorably into their plans. And as Dinu finds himself caught up in the search for Varsha, buried memories of his own past begin to surface.Travelling between late-sixties Calcutta and present-day Brooklyn, Ghost-Eye is an urgent and expansive novel about family, fate and our fragile planet.'Amitav Ghosh's intellectual panache and serene mastery of form make him one of the last great practitioners of the novel of ideas. Captivating' Pankaj Mishra

Bundook. Vapen. Ett vanligt ord, men ett som vänder upp och ner på Dean Dattas liv. Han tvingas överge sitt stillsamma liv i New York som handlare i sällsynta böcker och ge sig ut på en resa utöver det vanliga; en resa som tar honom från Indien till Los Angeles och Venedig. Öarna är berättelsen om en värld på randen till katastrof, om allt större folkförflyttningar och om ostoppbar förändring. Men det är också en berättelse om hopp, kärlek och tilltro till framtiden. Amitav Ghosh är en flerfaldigt prisbelönad författare. Han har bland annat tidigare skrivit den hyllade Ibis-trilogin, "Ett hav av vallmo", "En flod av rök" och "En våg av eld". "Rafflande samtidsroman" skrev DN Kultur när boken kom ut. "En av årets riktigt stora överraskningar" menade SR Kultur.

Bundook. Gun. A common word, but one which turns Deen Datta's world upside down.A dealer of rare books, Deen is used to a quiet life spent indoors, but as his once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is forced to set out on an extraordinary journey; one that takes him from India to Los Angeles and Venice via a tangled route through the memories and experiences of those he meets along the way. There is Piya, a fellow Bengali-American who sets his journey in motion; Tipu, an entrepreneurial young man who opens Deen's eyes to the realities of growing up in today's world; Rafi, with his desperate attempt to help someone in need; and Cinta, an old friend who provides the missing link in the story they are all a part of. It is a journey which will upend everything he thought he knew about himself, about the Bengali legends of his childhood and about the world around him.Gun Island is a beautifully realised novel which effortlessly spans space and time. It is the story of a world on the brink, of increasing displacement and unstoppable transition. But it is also a story of hope, of a man whose faith in the world and the future is restored by two remarkable women.

'A bracing new history of the global opium trade . . . Ghosh's tentacular history embraces opium's entanglement with furniture, architecture, gardens and its role in modern wars . . . But it's Ghosh's big-picture thinking that has made his nonfiction so influential . . . A huge achievement' The New York Times Book ReviewFrom the nineteenth century the British reaped huge profits by exporting vast quantities of opium from India, waged wars to defend its access to markets, and created a devastating addiction crisis in China. A sweeping story of greed and power, Smoke and Ashes reveals how opium created the wealth of modern cities like Mumbai, Singapore and Shanghai, as well as many of America's most powerful families and institutions, and is a part of Ghosh's personal history. 'Ghosh triumphs in laying out the shame of the British Empire's opium trade for all to see' Financial Times'This gave me a deeper chill than any TV series about the opioid crisis. . . The writing is sublime, the research thorough, the eye for story superb' Sunday Telegraph'Superlative . . . synthesise[s] a wealth of research with remarkable intellectual clarity' The Times 'Expansive and thoughtful' Peter Frankopan, The Spectator

'Do not miss this book' NAOMI KLEIN, author of This Changes EverythingThe history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation - of both human life and the natural environment - and the origin of our contemporary climate crisis.Tracing the threats to our future to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean, The Nutmeg's Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. The story of the nutmeg becomes a parable revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials - spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, Ghosh shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning.Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Ghosh frames these historical stories in a way that connects our shared colonial past with the deep inequality we see around us today. By interweaving discussions on everything from the global history of the oil trade to the migrant crisis and the animist spirituality of indigenous communities around the world, The Nutmeg's Curse offers a sharp critique of contemporary society and speaks to the profoundly remarkable ways in which human history is shaped by non-human forces.

A NEW EDITION WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY NEEL MUKHERJEE The international bestseller from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author 'Ghosh has established himself as one of the finest prose writers of his generation' Financial Times Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of social and political chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love will shape his life. He cannot forget her, and years later, as a rich man, he goes in search of her.From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author, an unforgettable story of love, war and family. Spanning three generations, in Burma, Malaya and India, The Glass Palace is an extraordinary epic.

The International Bestseller from the Man Booker Prize shortlisted author ‘An absorbing story of a world in transition’ J. M. 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.

A profound and absorbing saga from the Internationally Bestselling and Man Booker Prize shortlisted author'Amitav Ghosh is such a fascinating and seductive writer… I cannot think of another contemporary writer with whom it would be this thrilling to go so far, so fast' The TimesJanuary 2001: A small ship, led by wealthy Scotsman Daniel Hamilton, arrives in the Sundarbans, a vast archipelago of islands in the mythical river Ganges, a half-drowned land where the waters of the Himalayas merge with the incoming tides of the sea.In the Sundarbans the tides reach more than 100 miles inland, and every day thousands of hectares of forest disappear only to re-emerge hours later. Dense as the mangrove forests are, from Hamilton’s point of view, it is only a little less barren than a desert.The eccentric Scotsman and the scientists on board the ship disembark to study this little-known environment, and to trace the journeys of the descendants of this society. Their goal? To create a utopian society, of all races and religions, and conquer the might of the Sundarbans.

In twenty short books, Penguin brings you the classics of the environmental movement.In this personal and wide-ranging exploration of how our collective imaginations fail to grasp the scale of environmental destruction, Amitav Ghosh summons writers and novelists to confront the most urgent story of our times.Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement. Together, these books show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world.

The Hungry Tide is a very contemporary story of adventure and unlikely love, identity and history, set in one of the most fascinating regions on the earth. Off the easternmost coast of India, in the Bay of Bengal, lies the immense labyrinth of tiny islands known as the Sundarbans. For settlers here, life is extremely precarious. Attacks by deadly tigers are common. Unrest and eviction are constant threats. Without warning, at any time, tidal floods rise and surge over the land, leaving devastation in their wake. In this place of vengeful beauty, the lives of three people from different worlds collide. Piya Roy is a young marine biologist, of Indian descent but stubbornly American, in search of a rare, endangered river dolphin. Her journey begins with a disaster, when she is thrown from a boat into crocodile-infested waters. Rescue comes in the form of a young, illiterate fisherman, Fokir. Although they have no language between them, Piya and Fokir are powerfully drawn to each other, sharing an uncanny instinct for the ways of the sea. Piya engages Fokir to help with her research and finds a translator in Kanai Dutt, a businessman from Delhi whose idealistic aunt and uncle are longtime settlers in the Sundarbans. As the three of them launch into the elaborate backwaters, they are drawn unawares into the hidden undercurrents of this isolated world, where political turmoil exacts a personal toll that is every bit as powerful as the ravaging tide. Already an international success, The Hungry Tide is a prophetic novel of remarkable insight, beauty, and humanity.

'As hypnotic as an opium dream and pretty unputdownable' Daily MailIn September 1838 a storm blows up on the Indian Ocean and the Ibis, a ship carrying a consignment of convicts and indentured laborers from Calcutta to Mauritius, is caught up in the whirlwind. When the seas settle, five men have disappeared - two lascars, two convicts and one of the passengers. Did the same storm upend the fortunes of those aboard the Anahita, an opium carrier heading towards Canton? And what fate befell those aboard the Redruth, a sturdy two-masted brig heading East out of Cornwall? Was it the storm that altered their course or were the destinies of these passengers at the mercy of even more powerful forces?On the grand scale of an historical epic, River of Smoke follows its storm-tossed characters to the crowded harbors of China. There, despite efforts of the emperor to stop them, ships from Europe and India exchange their cargoes of opium for boxes of tea, silk, porcelain and silver. Among them are Bahram Modi, a wealthy Parsi opium merchant out of Bombay, his estranged half-Chinese son Ah Fatt, the orphaned Paulette and a motley collection of others whose pursuit of romance, riches and a legendary rare flower have thrown together. All struggle to cope with their losses - and for some, unimaginable freedoms - in the alleys and crowded waterways of 19th century Canton. As transporting and mesmerizing as an opiate induced dream, River of Smoke will soon be heralded as a masterpiece of twenty-first century literature.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008'Sea of Poppies boasts a varied collection of characters to love and hate, and provides wonderfully detailed descriptions . . . utterly involving and piles on tension until the very last page' Sunday TimesAt the heart of this epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars, is an old slaving-ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, its crew a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed villager, from an evangelical English opium trader to a mulatto American freedman. As their old family ties are washed away they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races and generations. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of China. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, which makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive - a masterpiece from one of the world's finest novelists.

The thrilling climax to the Ibis trilogy that began with the phenomenal Booker-shortlisted Sea of Poppies.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.Flood of Fire is a thrillingly realised and richly populated novel, imbued with a wealth of historical detail, suffused with the magic of place and plotted with verve. It is a beautiful novel in its own right, and a compelling conclusion to an epic and sweeping story - it is nothing short of a masterpiece.