The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh [0]
THE HUNGRY TIDE
AMITAV GHOSH was born in Calcutta in 1956 and raised and educated in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Egypt, India, and the United Kingdom, where he received his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Oxford. Acclaimed for fiction, travel writing, and journalism, his books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land, and Dancing in Cambodia. His previous novel, The Glass Palace, sold more than a half-million copies in Britain. The Hungry Tide has been sold for translation in twelve foreign countries and is also a bestseller abroad. Ghosh has won France’s Prix Medici Etranger, India’s prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Pushcart Prize. He divides his time between New York and Calcutta, and is a visiting scholar at Harvard University.
Other books by Amitav Ghosh
THE GLASS PALACE
THE CALCUTTA CHROMOSOME
THE SHADOW LINES
IN AN ANTIQUE LAND
THE CIRCLE OF REASON
Amitav Ghosh
THE HUNGRY TIDE
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Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2005.
Simultaneously published in the U.S.A. with Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South,
New York, NY 10003. Originally published in 2004 in the U.K. by HarperCollins Publishers, 77–85
Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W68JB.
(WEB) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Copyright © Amitav Ghosh, 2004
Lines from Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by A. Poulin, Jr. Copyright © 1975, 1976, 1977 by A. Poulin, Jr. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
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Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Book design by Melissa Lotfy
Map by Jacques Chazaud
Manufactured in Canada.
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Ghosh, Amitav
The hungry tide / Amitav Ghosh.
ISBN 0-14-301557-5
I. Title.
PR9499.3.G535H85 2005 823’.914 C2004-905402-3
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ISBN-13: 978-0-14-301557-4
ISBN-10: 0-14-301557-5
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data available
American Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data available
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For Lila
CONTENTS
PART ONE
The Ebb: Bhata
PART TWO
The Flood: Jowar
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Part One
The Ebb: Bhata
THE TIDE COUNTRY
KANAI SPOTTED HER the moment he stepped