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The Hungry Tide
A Novel
by Amitav Ghosh
Ghosh's fifth novel is set in the Sundarban Islands, off the easternmost coast of India.
Houghton Mifflin, 352 pages
05/03/2005
$25.00
ISBN: 0618329978
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Daily Telegraph Jeremy Worman
Spellbinding, tautly written contemporary story of struggle and human dignity.
Publishers Weekly
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.
Kirkus Reviews
Ghosh tells their stories in parallel narratives suffused with an impressive wealth of historical, cetological and ethnographic detail (which isn't always successfully dramatized). The result is a fascinating tapestry.
The New York Times Book Review Anderson Tepper
Ghosh has imbued his novels with rich social, historical, even anthropological detail.
Daily Telegraph Benjamin Markovits
The Hungry Tide belongs to a category of books particularly difficult to review: the quite good ones.
The Economist
What makes the book so rewarding is not so much the story as the observations within it.
Chicago Tribune Art Winslow
In this way, The Hungry Tide integrates the human and natural worlds, and the conceptual and social worlds of its characters, in a fluid narrative that includes natural catastrophes present and historical, political and personal tragedy, and a juxtaposition of modern and primitive existences. [19 June 2005]
Los Angeles Times Richard Eder
Ghosh's novel is in some sense an epic. The principal characters, and some of the minor ones, are splendidly human and varied, yet they carry suggestions of the emblematic roles, the cosmic questionings, of India's own epic Bhagavad-Gita. The questionings speak of the relations between nature and mankind. [22 May 2005, p.R7]
Entertainment Weekly Allyssa Lee
Amitav Ghosh not only infuses great energy and spirit into an engrossing tale of caste and culture, he deftly introduces readers to a little-known world and makes it familiar.
San Francisco Chronicle Sandip Roy
You may learn more about river dolphins and fishing than you ever wanted to. But the tug of the novel's undercurrent will leave an imprint on the reader much as the ebb tide relentlessly reshapes the islands of the Sundarbans.
The Nation Nell Freudenberger
What is extraordinary about this novel is not its timeliness but the author's ability to see an environment from several conflicted points of view--the scientist's, the fisherman's, the historian's--without favoring any of them. A landscape can give a writer great gifts; maybe this multi-faceted perspective is something the best novels can give back to the places that inspired them.
Village Voice Uday Benegal
From one of India's most erudite writers comes a tale awash in folklore, displacement, revolution, survival—and dolphins.
Washington Post Ron Charles
At heart Ghosh is a storyteller, not a dramatist, and this is a novel of compelling stories, both beautiful and harrowing.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Charles Foran
Given that we now tend to set our lives to movie-time, it is easy to forget that literary language trades speed for precision and resonance. All of which makes the ending of The Hungry Tide a disappointment.
TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Abdulrazak Gurnah
In The Hungry Tide the narrative stakes are higher but the argument is less profound. To deconstruct the reputation of the Sundarban as an eerie nightmare forest, and to construct the grim reality of its everyday hazards, is to make the people who live in it heroic. Amitav Ghosh is not crude about this - he never is - but the demonstration that wisdom comes from living close to nature is nonetheless familiar.
Boston Globe Thrity Umrigar
Given Ghosh's minimalist prose and understated emotions, The Hungry Tide leaves one -- well, hungry, for more of an emotional connection. The epilogue feels like a satisfying dessert after a main course that is nourishing, beautifully presented, but small-portioned.
 The average user rating for this book is 9.4 (out of 10) based on 5 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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