Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye is perhaps his most intriguingly unsettled novel yet — a story that sits uncomfortably between realist observation and speculative musing, and in doing so feels eerily alive to the anxieties of our moment. Spanning from late-1960s Calcutta to present-day Brooklyn, the novel begins with a simple but uncanny premise: three-year-old Varsha Gupta, born into a strict vegetarian household, insists she once lived by a river, caught and cooked fish with another mother, and will not eat until she has some. What should read as an absurd tantrum becomes, under Ghosh’s deft hand, the axis of a narrative about identity, memory, ecology and the limits of what we consider “real.”

It is Dr Shoma Bose, a psychiatrist fascinated by so-called “cases of the reincarnation type,” who first takes Varsha seriously, her curiosity opening an unexpected door between past and present. Decades later, her nephew, Dinu — now living in Brooklyn — finds himself drawn back into the mystery, intertwining family history with an urgent environmental cause in the Sundarbans. Through these shifting timelines, Ghosh threads together questions of what we inherit and what we fail to see when we view the world only through the lens of science or scepticism.

Ghosh’s prose is quietly immersive: there are passages where the sensory pleasures of Kolkata markets and the taste of river fish are described with loving precision, and others where the weight of climate loss creeps in like a slow tide. At its best, Ghost-Eye evokes both wonder and disquiet, asking whether the boundaries between memory, myth and material truth might be more porous than we admit.

This is not a novel that resolves neatly. It lingers instead in the spaces between belief and doubt, flesh and spirit, the ecological and the personal — and it is all the richer for that.

Ghosh has long been, and remains, one of my favourite authors of all time, and so my particular thanks go to the publisher for the advance copy.