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Fionnuala McHugh

It is seven years since Indian author Amitav Ghosh last published a novel.
For many readers, he is a fiction writer best known for The Glass Palace (2000) and his Ibis trilogy comprising Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015). These are set against historically accurate moments during the British Empire, but are works of imagination. Like his readers, he says he thinks of himself as “primarily a novelist”.
In more recent years, however, he has focused on non-fiction. He has written about climate change (The Great Derangement, 2016), the environmental ravages of imperial greed (The Nutmeg’s Curse, 2021), the opioid crisis (Smoke and Ashes, 2023) and the factual aftermath of, again, colonial greed (Wild Fictions, a book of essays published in 2025).
With his new novel, Ghost-Eye, he has returned to his literary roots.
“I was desperate to get back to fiction,” he explains in an email from his home in New York. “And, luckily for me, an interesting story happened to come into my mind.”

At the story’s core is a three-year-old girl who begins to recall her past life as a fisherwoman. But Ghosh is wary of the word “reincarnation”.
“I don’t know whether some mechanism exists whereby souls migrate from one body to another … what I do know, however, is that there are many, many children who have recalled memories of previous lives at around the age of three.”
In India, where it was published at the end of last year, some readers have seen it as a work about climate change. Ghosh disagrees. In the first place, he says, he does not believe that we should elevate climate change above the world’s other crises.
“Biodiversity loss, species extinctions, geopolitical tensions – these are all just as important,” he emails, adding that nuclear war currently looms above all. At the same time, “I would like to emphasise that while these crises serve as a general background to the story of Ghost-Eye, they are not in any sense what the novel is ‘about’.”
Like many writers with a new book, he is not going to volunteer what it is “about”, but even in bare outline, there are echoes from his 1996 novel The Calcutta Chromosome, a brave – some might say baffling – work that mind-melds time travel with the battle against malaria.
He was 40 when that book was published. In its chronological leaps, its hefty research and its eccentricity, it was already classic Ghosh. It won Britain’s Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel in 1997.

Three decades later, he can say that The Calcutta Chromosome was “about possession – by history, by ideas, by other selves” and that Ghost-Eye “touches on similar themes but from the other side of a lifetime”.
He agrees that rereading his earlier work was a particular version of past-life experience. Asked if he recognised himself, he replies, “There is recognition, of course, but also a sense of distance, even wonder. My younger self was intent on a certain kind of complexity, on playing with form. He was building a puzzle. Now I feel I am trying to listen to a whisper from a future that is already receding.”
In writing Ghost-Eye, he says simply, “I was just following my own interests and was guided by curiosity.”
Fifteen years ago – halfway through this literary transition from builder to listener – we met for lunch in New York when he was promoting River of Smoke with a dutiful weariness. He was polite, a little restrained in his responses, not much given to anecdote; he was, in fact, the opposite of his books, particularly the Ibis trilogy, which vigorously leaps between 19th-century India and China and loves to peacock its knowledge of place and language.
Of the publicity treadmill, he said then, “There are many more ebullient, demonstrative people who can do that … I find it harder and harder.” Hence, today’s emailed questions and answers.
But he had a feisty reputation. “I’ll stuff your laurels between your teeth,” cries the Dickensian Mr Doughty in Sea of Poppies, and Ghosh effectively yelled as much to the organisers of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2001 when they tried to award its Eurasian-regional prize to The Glass Palace. He refused the accolade because it required qualifying books to be written in English, from lands once conquered, then ruled, by the British.

On the other hand, in 2010, he accepted the Dan David Prize, along with Margaret Atwood, at Tel Aviv University, despite public pressure to refuse because of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. In New York in 2011, he said, “I’ve always thought you must have some privileged places – this was a university – and the things being written were incredibly manipulative.”
Since then, anyone listening to the world has heard it grow more complicated. Ghosh is prompt with his written responses to the list of questions, but to the one that asks if he would now accept the Dan David Prize, the reply is: “Author prefers not to answer.”
He is no fan of the West. In a recent piece in Equator, a magazine founded last year by a collective of writers, including Pankaj Mishra and Mohsin Hamid, whose stated aim is “to unravel the monotone global fabric forged during the era of Western dominance”, Ghosh refers to “widespread doomsaying” in Europe and America and the “general sense of political dysfunction and historic decline”.
Asked why he stays there, he replies, “I live not in a vast abstraction called America but in a very particular place called Brooklyn, which has its own culture and folkways and history.” He has lived in the same house for 30 years. His children and grandson live nearby; his local friends include Mira Nair and Mahmood Mamdani, “the parents of our current mayor, the amazing Zohran Mamdani”.
Occasionally, he returns to Kolkata, the Indian city he still calls Calcutta, and to the haunts of his former life. “These places continue to nourish my imagination just as much as Brooklyn does. This will be evident to anyone who reads Ghost-Eye.”

Despite decline, dysfunction and possible nuclear war, he still has literary faith: he is currently writing a manuscript for the Future Library Project. He is the 12th writer to be asked to contribute a work that will remain unread until 2114. Later this year, he will publicly hand it over amid a forest of young Norwegian trees that will eventually supply the paper on which it will be printed.
By 2114, his life will be long past, and no matter how hard he listens, the future’s whispers are unknowable. He writes that it is, indeed, a formidable challenge.
“But I think it’s worth doing because it commits one to thinking of time on a different scale.”
Amitav Ghosh will give the marquee talk of the 25th Hong Kong International Literary Festival at the Hong Kong Central Library on March 5, 2026, at 7pm. For details, visit the festival’s website.


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The cover of Amitav Ghosh’s new book, Ghost-Eye.

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(From left) Scottish artist Katie Paterson, Ghosh and Anne Beate Hovind, chair of the Future Library Trust, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August 2025. Photo: courtesy of Anne Beate Hovind

Ghosh signs a copy of his new book at the 49th International Kolkata Book Fair. Photo: Getty Images

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Books

Ahead of his Hong Kong International Literary Festival appearance, Ghosh talks about his new book Ghost-Eye and re-reading earlier works


Ahead of his Hong Kong International Literary Festival appearance, Ghosh talks about his new book Ghost-Eye and re-reading earlier works.


India

Indian author Amitav Ghosh publishes first novel in 7 years. Why so long?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Ahead of his Hong Kong International Literary Festival appearance, Ghosh talks about his new book Ghost-Eye and re-reading earlier works

Ahead of his Hong Kong International Literary Festival appearance, Ghosh talks about his new book Ghost-Eye and re-reading earlier works