Wow. Well, I've certainly never read a book quite like this before, and I'm so glad I read it.

Just a few of the topics Ghosh explores:

+ The nature of the novel
+ The way imperialism and capitalism play off of each other
+ Colonial vs precolonial founding of cities
+ Tigers in mangroves
+ Predicting the likelihood of cyclones hitting Mumbai
+ The effects of probability based thinking on city planning and literary fiction
+ The Romantics in Lake Geneva in 1816
+ The loss of the collective in literary fiction
+ Why coal inspires art but oil doesn’t
+ The slowly erected wall between scifi and literary fiction
+ High culture’s disdain for illustration
+ Asia’s centrality to the climate crisis
+ The history of the Burmese oil industry
+ The pitfalls of the dominance of the Anglosphere
+ The prose stylings of Pope Francis vs. the committee who wrote the Paris Agreement