Amitav Ghosh’s return to fiction with Ghost-Eye feels both timely and quietly inevitable. Launched this week in New Delhi, the novel arrives at a moment when questions of memory, loss, and ecological collapse have moved from the margins of public discourse to its troubled centre. Ghosh, long regarded as one of India’s most intellectually ambitious writers, uses this new work to revisit familiar concerns while giving them an unusually intimate and unsettling form.
The novel begins with an image that is disarmingly simple and deeply strange. Varsha Gupta, a three-year-old child growing up in a strict vegetarian household in Calcutta, begins to crave fish. Her insistence is not framed as childish obstinacy but as memory. She speaks of another mother, a mud house by a river, and a life where catching and cooking fish was routine. Ghosh resists sensationalism here. The uncanny is introduced gently, almost matter-of-factly, allowing the reader to sit with uncertainty rather than rush toward explanation.
This unease draws Varsha’s family to Dr. Shoma Bose, a psychiatrist who specialises in what are known as “cases of the reincarnation type.” From this point, Ghost-Eye opens outward, moving between the charged political atmosphere of late-1960s Calcutta and the fractured, emotionally distant landscape of contemporary Brooklyn. The shifts in time and place are handled with restraint, reflecting Ghosh’s confidence as a storyteller who no longer needs to announce the scale of his ambition.
What distinguishes Ghost-Eye from conventional ghost stories is its refusal to treat reincarnation as either fantasy or proof. Instead, it becomes a narrative tool for examining how memory persists beyond individual lives, and how the past continues to inhabit the present in ways that are often invisible but deeply consequential. Ghosh’s interest lies less in whether Varsha’s memories are “true” than in what they reveal about the modern refusal to acknowledge forms of knowledge that fall outside rationalist frameworks.
The novel’s emotional and intellectual weight becomes clearer in its engagement with environmental loss. During the book’s launch, Ghosh spoke about fragility—of landscapes, institutions, and shared intellectual life—and Ghost-Eye reflects these anxieties with quiet insistence. The ecological is never presented as abstract crisis. It enters the narrative through memory, longing, and disappearance. Rivers, hills, and food traditions appear not as symbols but as lived realities that are slipping away.
Food, in particular, emerges as one of the novel’s most potent motifs. Varsha’s craving for fish is more than a trace of a former life; it is a sensory connection to a riverine world that is steadily vanishing. Ghosh suggests that taste and appetite may be among the last ways humans remain anchored to the earth. In doing so, he renders the vastness of climate change intimate, grounded in bodily memory rather than data or catastrophe.
There is also a quieter lament running through the novel, one concerned with the erosion of institutions. Ghosh’s reflections on the decline of intellectual spaces such as Delhi University echo a broader sense of cultural depletion. The decay of learning and the destruction of ecosystems are presented as parallel processes, each driven by short-term thinking and a disregard for continuity.
In Ghost-Eye, Ghosh returns to what he has always done best: taking the long view. Where the Ibis Trilogy traced the historical foundations of global capitalism and The Great Derangement confronted humanity’s climate blindness, this novel turns inward, asking what remains when memory itself becomes endangered. The narrative voice, rooted in a distinctly Bengali storytelling tradition, is intimate yet expansive, resisting linear time in favour of layered existence.
Ghost-Eye does not argue or instruct. It remembers. In doing so, it offers a profound meditation on how personal memory, cultural inheritance, and ecological survival are inseparable. The novel stands as a haunting and thoughtful work, reaffirming Ghosh’s place as a writer who understands that the future can only be imagined by those willing to listen carefully to what the past refuses to let go.
