Amitav Ghosh Books in Order

In late 1960s Calcutta, three-year-old Varsha shocks her vegetarian family by insisting she once lived by a river and ate fish, sending psychiatrist Shoma Bose into the uncanny world of reincarnation cases that echo forward into present-day activism and climate anxiety.

Collecting essays from across twenty-five years, this volume gathers Ghosh's reflections on imperialism, decolonization, climate change, language, and travel, showing how stories about spices, mangrove forests, and multilingual lives can challenge the myths that sustain empire and extraction.

Blending memoir, archival research, and travel writing, Ghosh traces how the opium trade shaped Britain, India, China, and even his own family, revealing the drug's role in building empires, corporations, and many of the inequalities of the modern global economy.

Drawing on the bloody history of the Banda Islands and the global trade in spices, this book connects colonial conquest to today's ecological crisis, using the humble nutmeg to show how extractive thinking still shapes violence, inequality, and climate breakdown.

Told in rhythmic verse and inspired by a beloved Bengali legend, this retelling of the Bon Bibi story follows a greedy merchant, a vulnerable boy, and the spirits of the Sundarbans, turning a folk tale into an ecological fable about greed and balance.

Rare-book dealer Deen Datta is pulled out of his quiet Brooklyn life by an old Bengali legend, sending him from the Sundarbans to Venice through a world of storms, refugees, and uncanny coincidences that link folklore to a warming planet.

In this extended essay, Ghosh asks why modern novels, politics, and history have struggled to face climate change, tracing links between empire, fossil fuels, and culture, and urging readers to rethink what stories we tell about the planet.

In the trilogy's climax, soldiers, sailors, and merchants from India, China, and Britain are drawn into the First Opium War, as the fate of the Ibis's former passengers collides with imperial ambition in a story of loyalty, profit, and rebellion.

As three ships from a violent storm converge on Canton, opium trader Bahram Modi, artist Paulette, and other survivors navigate the crowded foreign enclave, where trade intrigues and local resistance push China and the British Empire toward open conflict.

This reportage-driven book follows Ghosh in the months after India and Pakistan's 1998 nuclear tests, as he travels from desert test sites to glacial front lines, listening to soldiers, villagers, and activists debate risk, nationalism, and war.

Set on the eve of the First Opium War, this novel follows a Bihari widow, a disgraced zamindar, a mixed-race American sailor, and others as they board the ship Ibis for Mauritius, their intersecting journeys reshaping caste, identity, and freedom.

In this slim collection, Ghosh braids reportage and memoir, from royal dancers on a 1906 trip to Europe to visits to post-tsunami islands and a child's-eye view of September 11, asking how ordinary lives absorb political upheaval.

Spanning war zones, disaster sites, and city streets, these essays take readers from the Andaman Islands after the 2004 tsunami to New York on September 11, tracing how violence, nationalism, and memory shape communities in Asia and beyond.

In the mangrove labyrinth of the Sundarbans, American marine biologist Piya Roy teams up with a taciturn fisherman and an urbane translator to study rare river dolphins, only to be swept into local politics, myth, and the dangers of a rising sea.

This essay collection grows out of Ghosh's years of anthropological fieldwork, from Egyptian villages to Indian cities, exploring envy, labor, fundamentalism, and storytelling, and reflecting on how older civilizations negotiate the power and violence of the modern world.

Beginning with the British invasion of Mandalay, this sweeping novel follows orphaned outsider Rajkumar and palace attendant Dolly across Burma, India, and Malaya, as royal courts fall, rubber fortunes rise, and families are tested by war, empire, and changing ideas of nationhood.

Gathering reportage from Cambodia and Myanmar, these essays juxtapose royal dancers, colonial monuments, and resistance movements, asking how art, architecture, and personal memory carry the weight of revolution, dictatorship, and forgotten wars in Southeast Asia.

Set between near-future New York, 1990s Calcutta, and colonial India, this speculative thriller follows a data analyst and an obsessed researcher as they uncover a secretive group whose shadowy experiments rewrite the story of malaria, science, and reincarnation.

Part travelogue, part historical reconstruction, this book moves between 1980s Egyptian villages and the medieval Indian Ocean, as Ghosh traces a Jewish merchant and his Indian slave through Geniza documents while reflecting on friendship, religion, and the legacies of empire.

Told through a web of family memories, this novel links a Calcutta boy to relatives in London and Dhaka, weaving together childhood obsession, Partition-era violence, and questions about borders that can exist in maps yet vanish inside people's lives.

Ghosh's debut follows Alu, an orphan with an unusually shaped head, who is falsely accused of terrorism and driven from a Bengal village to an oil town in the Gulf and onward to North Africa, chasing work, safety, and a sense of belonging.