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The 2006 Award


The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh


The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh

 

Nominated by:

  • Médiathèque de l'Agglomération de Montpellier, France
  • Stadtbibliothek Bremen, Germany


Publisher of Nominated Edition
HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN 0007141777
the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors
ABOUT THE BOOK

The Hungry Tide is a very contemporary story of adventure and unlikely love, identity and history, set in one of the most fascinating regions on the earth.

Off the easternmost coast of India, in the Bay of Bengal, lies the immense labyrinth of tiny islands known as the Sundarbans. For settlers here, life is extremely precarious. Attacks by deadly tigers are common. Unrest and eviction are constant threats. Without warning, at any time, tidal floods rise and surge over the land, leaving devastation in their wake.

In this place of vengeful beauty, the lives of three people from different worlds collide. Piya Roy is a young marine biologist, of Indian descent but stubbornly American, in search of a rare, endangered river dolphin. Her journey begins with a disaster, when she is thrown from a boat into crocodile-infested waters. Rescue comes in the form of a young, illiterate fisherman, Fokir. Although they have no language between them, Piya and Fokir are powerfully drawn to each other, sharing an uncanny instinct for the ways of the sea. Piya engages Fokir to help with her research and finds a translator in Kanai Dutt, a businessman from Delhi whose idealistic aunt and uncle are longtime settlers in the Sundarbans. As the three of them launch into the elaborate backwaters, they are drawn unawares into the hidden undercurrents of this isolated world, where political turmoil exacts a personal toll that is every bit as powerful as the ravaging tide.

Already an international success, The Hungry Tide is a prophetic novel of remarkable insight, beauty, and humanity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

One of the most widely known Indians writing in English today, Amitav Ghosh's books include The Circle of Reason, winner of the Prix Medici Estranger, The Shadow Lines, winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 1997, and The Glass Palace, winner of the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International e-Book Awards, 2001. He lives with his wife and their children in Brooklyn, USA.


 

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