3 Review(s)

It starts with the boy's perceptive and eccentric cousin Tridib, who gives the boy worlds to travel in and eyes to see with long before he ever leaves Calcutta. As the boy grows he finds himself sucked into history: his grandmother stuck in an age-old family feud; Tridib and his family in England in 1993 ; their English friends whose daughter's love for Tridib can only end in tragedy. All the while private upheavals are mirrored by public turmoil-the Blitz in war-time London, civil strife in post-Partition Dhaka, a riot in Calcutta. This novel focuses on the meaning of political freedom in the modern world and the force of nationalism, the Shadow Line we draw between people nations, which is both an absurd illusion and a source of terrifying violence. The four critical essays in this edition will prove helpful and stimulating for both the student and the general reader. This is the first edition of the novel to include aids for university under-graduates. Winner of the 1989 Sahitya Akademi Award and the Prix Medicis Etrangere, Amitav Chosh spent his childhood in Calcutta (where he was born in 1956) and in Dhaka and Colombo. He graduated from Delhi University and went on to take a D.Phil. in Social Anthropology at Oxford. He has taught at the Delhi School of Economics and has been Visiting Professor at Columbia University and Virginia University in the United States. Hlis other books include Circle of Reason and In An Antique Land.