This is the only place on earth where man is more often prey than predator. There is a terrible, vengeful beauty here, a place teeming with crocodiles, snakes, sharks and man-eating tigers. Dense as the mangrove forests are, from a human point of view it is only a little less barren than a desert. In the Sundarbans the tides reach more than 100 miles inland and every day thousands of hectares of forest disappear only to re-emerge hours later. It is this vast archipelago of islands that provides the setting for Amitav Ghosh s new novel. The result is the Sundarbans, an immense stretch of mangrove forest, a half-drowned land where the waters of the Himalayas merge with the incoming tides of the sea.
It is only when the Ganges approaches the Bay of Bengal that it frees itself and separates into thousands of wandering strands.
An Indian myth says that when the river Ganges first descended from the heavens, the force of the cascade was so great that the earth would have been destroyed if it had not been for the god Shiva, who tamed the torrent by catching it in his dreadlocks. The Hungry Tide is a rich, exotic saga set in Calcutta and in the vast archipelago of islands in the Bay of Bengal.
Fom the author of The Glass Palace, the widely-acclaimed bestseller.
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