One of the most celebrated storytellers of our time has returned to telling stories.
Amitav Ghosh’s 2025 novel Ghost-Eye marks a return to fiction after seven years, revisiting the thematic and geographic landscapes of his earlier works, most notably The Hungry Tide and Gun Island. The novel comes after a period in which Ghosh largely focused on non-fiction.
On Friday, Day 2 of the Exide Kolkata Literary Meet, partnered by The Telegraph, Ghosh spoke about his new book at the Alipore Museum in conversation with festival director Malavika Banerjee.
“How does it feel coming back to the novel?” Banerjee asked.
“It feels wonderful,” Ghosh said. “My heart lives for fiction. When you get back to writing fiction, you realise that just to be lost in that dream world is what I live for.”
Ghost-Eye blends themes of reincarnation, the climate crisis, and the supernatural, and brings readers back to familiar territory. Set partly in the mangroves of the Sundarbans, the novel also features characters from Ghosh’s earlier books, creating a shared fictional universe that connects his past work.
Banerjee asked how he found his way back to this world. “How did you go back to your Hungry Tide universe?” she asked.
Attendees at the Kolkata Literary Meet session. Picture by Bishwarup Dutta
Ghosh responded that while some of his intervening books addressed very different subjects, there was an underlying continuity. “It became very clear to me, just thinking about the state of the world we are in, that many of our problems begin with viewing the earth as inanimate — as something dead,” he said. This outlook, he argued, treats the planet and its resources as existing solely to be expropriated, exploited and extracted.
“The question then arises,” Ghosh continued, “if you don’t think of the earth in that way, what is the alternative? What is the other way in which you can think about the earth?”
Ghosh reflected on his own upbringing in India, at a time when extractive ideologies were not as pervasive as they are today. “I was exposed to different ways of thinking about the planet we live in,” he said. “I think it is so important to move away from that very mechanistic view of the Earth.”
Ghost-Eye centres around three-year-old Varsha Gupta, who carries memories of a past life, and Shoma Bose, a psychiatrist who investigates her case. The narrative moves between 1960s Calcutta and modern-day Brooklyn.
Banerjee spoke of the genre of dystopian, speculative and fantasy fiction. But Ghosh’s work, she noted, looks at the uncanny in the everyday.
She pointed to the familiar details in the book: Calcutta’s fabled load-sheddings, Southern Avenue with its leafy bungalows and recognisable settings. “To set it not in a fantastical universe, but in one we all recognise, somehow makes it more effective,” she said. “Was that something you tried to marry? The mundanity of normal life with something a bit inexplicable and uncanny?”
“Absolutely,” Ghosh said. “For me, speculative fiction and apocalyptic fiction don’t hold much appeal. Though there are some wonderful speculative novels... For me, it’s really important to see the unreality of the real. There are feelings of unreality that permeate our everyday lives.”