The Shadow Lines
- Publisher : Penguin Random House
- Binding : Paperback
- ISBN : 9780143448549
- Imprint : Penguin
- Age Group : Adult
- Language : English
As a young boy, Amitav Ghosh’s narrator travels across time through the tales of those around him, traversing the ...
As a young boy, Amitav Ghosh’s narrator travels across time through the tales of those around him, traversing the unreliable planes of memory, unmindful of physical, political and chronological borders. But as he grows older, he is haunted by a seemingly random act of violence. Bits and pieces of stories, both half-remembered and imagined, come together in his mind until he arrives at an intricate, interconnected picture of the world where borders and boundaries mean nothing, mere shadow lines that we draw dividing people and nations.
Out of a complex web of memories, relationships and images, Amitav Ghosh builds an intensely vivid, funny and moving story. Exposing the idea of the nation state as an illusion, an arbitrary dissection of people, Ghosh depicts the absurd manner in which your home can suddenly become your enemy.
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956, and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka; he studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria. He is the author of several acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction including The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, the Ibis Trilogy, The Great Derangement and Gun Island.
Amitav Ghosh's work has been translated into more than thirty languages. His essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New Republic and the New York Times. He has been awarded and honoured across the world for his work. In 2019 Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the preceding decade. The same year, the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour, was conferred on him: he was the first English-language writer to receive the award.
