The hungry tide

by Amitav Ghosh

333 pages

English language

Published Jan. 26, 2005 by Houghton Mifflin.

OCLC Number:: 57342147

Off the easternmost coast of India lies the immense archipelago of tiny islands known as the Sundarbans. Life there is precarious, ruled by the tides and the constant threat of attacks by Bengal tigers. Into this small community come two seekers from different worlds, whose lives collide with tragic consequences.

16 editions

loppear reviewed The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh

Sharp climate-tinged human pain

4 stars

Riveting exploration of selfishness and idealism and loss, set deep in the strange tidal mangroves shifting landscape of rivers and migrations of people and animals.

There are a couple scenes in here that so perfectly eviscerate our character's self-conceptions as good people in just a few lines, and then let them still be complicated and interdependent as the sense of morality too ebbs and washes.

Riveting exploration of selfishness and idealism and loss, set deep in the strange tidal mangroves shifting landscape of rivers and migrations of people and animals.

sarcasticirony reviewed The hungry tide by Amitav Ghosh

a riveting ride

5 stars

part of my seminar reading on ecocritical postcolonialism, and very well-selected i think, since Ghosh manages to deftly represent the intertwining of themes including migration, environmental preservation/degradation/balance, tensions between ways of knowing (science vs. local oral history), urban development etc.

Ikwezi reviewed The hungry tide by Amitav Ghosh

Review of 'The hungry tide' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Ended up really liking this book, but was struggling with it in the middle, because it provides a really good example of a work of fiction where the passages that were entirely in italics could have been ignored or excised entirely from the story. What is it about songs, epistolary writing, etc. that seems to give novelists permission to write badly and at length where they otherwise do not?