Ghost-Eye - by Amitav Ghosh (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Named a most anticipated book of 2026 by Esquire and Literary Hub

"Ghost-Eye is a marvel that will ignite a reader's sense of wonder--a masterful novel, at once simple and capacious." --Rabih Alameddine, National Book Award-winning author of The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)

Past and present collide in a novel about a girl who might just be a "case of the reincarnation type."

Varsha Gupta wants fish for lunch. Her family is shocked; the three-year-old has never tasted fish in her life. The Guptas are strict vegetarians and don't allow it inside their Calcutta mansion. But Varsha claims she can remember another life, in a mud house by a river where she caught and cooked fish with a different mother.

Perplexed, the Guptas turn to Dr. Shoma Bose, a psychologist who has been investigating what are known as "cases of the reincarnation type" for years. But her understanding of the world is changed forever by Varsha's revelations.

Half a century later, Varsha's case file catches the attention of a group of environmental activists, and Shoma's nephew Dinu is drawn inexorably into their plans. As Dinu finds himself caught up in the search for Varsha, buried memories of his own past begin to surface.

Traveling between late-1960s Calcutta and present-day Brooklyn, Amitav Ghosh's Ghost-Eye is an urgent and expansive novel from one of our greatest living storytellers, about family, fate, and our fragile planet.

Review Quotes

"The term 'one of a kind' gets bandied about in the arts quite a lot but the writer Amitav Ghosh not only deserves the encomium, he could function as a handy benchmark for assessing whether others merit it . . . Ghosh is a synthesist of the highest order, able to weave big, genre-bending ideas, vast sweeps of History and nuanced characterizations into compulsively readable narratives . . . Like nearly all Ghosh's work, Ghost-Eye contains multitudes that themselves contain multitudes . . . Magnificent."
--Junot Díaz, The New York Times Book Review

"[A] sweeping novel . . . The story--replete with history and science, spiritualism and synchronicities--suggests that to find salvation, we must 'remind ourselves of the old ways.'"
--The New Yorker

"Ghosh generates suspense by teasing out the history of [his character's] past life . . . The strangeness of Ghost-Eye will keep readers on their toes."
--Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Ghost-Eye is a marvel that will ignite a reader's sense of wonder--a masterful novel, at once simple and capacious. Amitav Ghosh is one of our finest writers."
--Rabih Alameddine, National Book Award-winning author of The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)

"This shape-shifting, time-stitching novel grants us special kinds of double vision: across eras and between species. Under its spell, Amitav Ghosh helps us begin to live multiple lives--to become aware of the porosity and mystery of being, rather than of its fortifications and frontiers."
--Robert Macfarlane, author of Is a River Alive?

"Ghosh writes with winning panache."
--The Times (London)

"Ghosh is a rarity in modern fiction: a rigorous writer unafraid to challenge his audience with dense material . . . Readers up to the task will be rewarded with a thrilling intellectual contest."
--BookPage

"A thoroughly gratifying return to the full-form novel . . . Always an exceptional storyteller, [Ghosh] brilliantly combines what can be touched and seen with the documented otherworldly . . . Ghosh gifts a magnificent story ready to be believed, appreciated, and celebrated."
--Shelf Awareness

"Ghosh's fluent novel is rich in its detailed knowledge . . . Ghosh's vision of environmental action taken by ordinary people against corporations is inspiring . . . Irresistibly readable."
--Kirkus Reviews

"An impressive feat."
--Publishers Weekly

"Amitav Ghosh has done more than any novelist to reimagine the role of fiction in our age of environmental emergency. In Ghost-Eye, he draws the reader from the world we know into a shadow realm of reincarnation and levitation, of talking trees and whispering spirits. Mournful and exhilarating, Ghost-Eye insists that, as its narrator says, 'In order to save the world, we have to remind ourselves of the old ways.'"
--Nathaniel Rich, author of Cloudthief and Losing Earth

"With swathes of history and science, humor under pressure, mysterious forces, and stunning revelations, Ghosh's provocative tale cues us to the wonders of the planet and spurs us to protest the mad greed and malfeasance fueling the climate crisis."
--Booklist

"Amitav Ghosh's intellectual panache and serene mastery of form make him one of the last great practitioners of the novel of ideas. Ghost-Eye is the most captivating expression yet of an imagination unfettered by the protocols of the liberal-humanist novel: a novel that explores the very real, if still oddly underexplored, world of the spirit that hundreds of millions of people inhabit simultaneously with its material counterpart."
--Pankaj Mishra, author of The World After Gaza and Run and Hide

"Metempsychosis, reincarnation--Amitav Ghosh's Ghost-Eye challenges you to believe, and on the way engages you with a gripping story of youth and self-knowledge."
--Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of Theft and Afterlives

"Ghost-Eye is a brilliant return to Amitav Ghosh's speculative vein, haunting and liberating as it confronts hierarchies ancient and modern."
--Siddhartha Deb, author of The Light at the End of the World and Twilight Prisoners

"Ghost-Eye is a well-executed story by one of the greatest novelists of our time. I was most excited to read it."
--Nuruddin Farah, author of North of Dawn

About the Author

Amitav Ghosh is the author of the bestselling Ibis Trilogy: Sea of Poppies (short-listed for the Man Booker Prize), River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire. His other novels include The Circle of Reason, which won the Prix Médicis étranger, and The Glass Palace. He is also the author of many works of nonfiction, including The Great Derangement, The Nutmeg's Curse, and Smoke and Ashes. In 2018, Ghosh became the first English-language writer to win the Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary honor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.