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

The settlers of the remote Sundarbans believe that anyone without a pure heart who ventures into the watery island labyrinth will never return. With the arrival of two outsiders from the modern world, the delicate balance of small community life uneasily shifts. Piya Roy is a marine biologist, of Indian descent but stubbornly American, in search of a rare dolphin. Kanai Dutt is an urbane Delhi businessman, here to retrieve the journal of his uncle, who died mysteriously in a local political uprising. When Piya hires an illiterate but proud local fisherman to guide her through the crocodile-infested backwaters, Kanai becomes her translator. From this moment, the tide begins to turn.

A contemporary story of adventure and romance, identity and history, The Hungry Tide travels deep into one of the most fascinating regions on earth, where the treacherous forces of nature and human folly threaten to destroy a way of life.

"One doesn't so much read Ghosh's masterful fifth novel as inhabit his characters and the alluring if treacherous Sundarban archipelago, 'the ragged fringe of [India's] sari,' where it is set. The author's nuanced descriptions of the moods and microenvironments of the islands serve as a lush backdrop for an intricate narrative that moves fluidly between past and present. Hoping to make her mark in the cetological world, Piyali Roy, an Indian-American marine biologist, travels across the Sundarbans in search of the once plentiful Irrawaddy dolphin. Piyali befriends both an illiterate fisherman, Fokir, who leads her to a dolphin-rich river enclave, and a successful interpreter, Kanai Dutt, who has arrived in the region from New Delhi to retrieve his deceased uncle Nirmal's journal. Through Nirmal, a Rilke-quoting former school headmaster and erstwhile revolutionary, Ghosh recounts the history of the islands with an unsentimental melancholy. Nirmal's account of the true story of the 1979 siege of Morichjhapi, in which destitute squatters were brutally evicted by the Indian government in order to preserve a wildlife sanctuary, poignantly displays the author's gift for traversing the fiction/nonfiction boundary. Ghosh (The Glass Palace, etc.), however, is uninterested in setting up simple good/evil binaries and instead weds the issues of love, language and land to the unfolding relationships among Piyali, Fokir and Kanai. The philosophical and moral implications of their actions remain simmering just below the surface. The climactic ending, in which a cyclone threatens the inhabitants of the Sundarbans, underscores Nirmal's observation that 'nothing escapes the maw of the tides.' Agent, Barney Karpfinger. (May) Forecast: Following Ghosh's international bestseller The Glass Palace and set in a region of India recently much in the news because of the tsunami, this should do very well as the author's first title for Houghton Mifflin. Eight-city author tour; foreign rights sold in 12 countries. " Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"[A] complex narrative filled with echoes of Naipaul and especially Conrad....A bit bumpy; still, overall, Ghosh's fifth is one of his most interesting." Kirkus Reviews

A contemporary story of adventure and romance, identity and history, this novel brings two outsiders deep into one of the most fascinating regions on Earth — tiny islands known as the Sundarbans off the coast of India — where life is ruled by the unforgiving tides and the constant threat of attack by Bengal tigers.

One of the most widely known Indians writing in English today, Ghosh's books include "The Circle of Reason," "The Shadow Lines," "In An Antique Land," "Dancing in Cambodia," "The Calcutta Chromosome," and "The Glass Palace."Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He studied at St. Stephen's College, Delhi; St. Edmund Hall, Oxford; and the Faculty of Arts, University of Alexandria. He worked for the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi and he earned his doctorate in Oxford before he wrote his first novel."The Circle of Reason" won the Prix Medici Estranger, one of France's top literary awards, and "The Shadow Lines" won the Sahitya Akademi Award, India's most prestigious literary prize."The Calcutta Chromosome" won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 1997 and "The Glass Palace" won the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International e-Book Awards in 2001. He was the winner of the 1999 Pushcart Prize, a leading literary award, for an essay that was published in the Kenyon Review.In 1999, Ghosh joined the faculty at Queens College in the City University of New York as Distinguished Professor in the Dept. of Comparative Literature. He lives with his wife, Deborah Baker (who is a senior editor at Little Brown &Co.), and their children, in Brooklyn, USA.

CONTENTS

part one The Ebb: Bhata 1

part two The Flood: Jowar 147

author’s note 330