Audiobooks by Amitav Ghosh

[Spanish] - La maldición de la nuez moscada (The Nutmeg's Curse): Parábolas para un planeta en crisi

El nuevo libro de Amitav Ghosh, una poderosa obra de historia, ensayo, testimonio y polémica, remonta nuestra crisis planetaria contemporánea al descubrimiento del Nuevo Mundo y la ruta marítima hacia el Océano Índico. ‘La maldición de la nuez moscada’ sostiene que la dinámica del cambio climático actual hunde sus raíces en un orden geopolítico secular construido por el colonialismo occidental. 1 / 7 En el centro de la narración de Ghosh está la hoy omnipresente especia nuez moscada. La historia de la nuez moscada es una historia de conquista y explotación, tanto de la vida humana como del entorno natural. En manos de Ghosh, la historia de la nuez moscada se convierte en una parábola de nuestra crisis medioambiental, revelando el modo en que la historia humana siempre ha estado enredada con materiales terrestres como las especias, el té, la caña de azúcar, el opio y los combustibles fósiles. Nuestra crisis, demuestra, es en última instancia el resultado de una visión mecanicista de la Tierra, en la que la naturaleza sólo existe como un recurso para que los humanos la utilicemos para nuestros propios fines, en lugar de una fuerza propia, llena de agencia y significado. Escribiendo con la pandemia mundial y las protestas de Black Lives Matter como telón de fondo, Ghosh enmarca estos relatos históricos de una manera que conecta nuestras historias coloniales compartidas con la profunda desigualdad que vemos a nuestro alrededor hoy en día. Entrelazando debates sobre todo tipo de temas, desde la historia global del comercio del petróleo hasta la crisis migratoria y la espiritualidad animista de las comunidades indígenas de todo el mundo, ‘La maldición de la nuez moscada’ ofrece una aguda crítica de la sociedad occidental y habla de las formas profundamente notables en que la historia humana está moldeada por fuerzas no humanas.

Amitav Ghosh (Author), Joel Valverde (Narrator)

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Mahaparbat: Ek Kahani Hamare Daur Ki

The Hindi translation of The Living Mountain. A new story from internationally renowned author Amitav Ghosh, Mahaparbat is a cautionary tale of how we have systematically exploited nature, leading to an environmental collapse. Recounted as a dream, this is a fable about Mahaparbat, the Living Mountain; the indigenous valley dwellers who live and prosper in its shelter; the assault on the mountain for commercial benefit by the Anthropoi, humans whose sole aim is to reap the bounty of nature; and the disaster that unfolds as a result. Mahaparbat is especially relevant today when we have been battling a pandemic and are facing a climate catastrophe: both of which are products of our insufficient understanding of mankind's relationship with nature, and our sustained appropriation and abuse of natural resources. This is a book of our times, for our times, and it will resonate strongly with readers of all ages.

Amitav Ghosh, Naved Akbar (Author), Pallavi Bharti, Ranjit Madgavkar (Narrator)

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The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability-at the level of literature, history, and politics-to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today's climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements. Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence-a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer's summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.

Amitav Ghosh (Author), Shridhar Solanki (Narrator)

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Flood of Fire

The stunningly vibrant final novel in the bestselling Ibis TrilogyIt is 1839 and China has embargoed the trade of opium, yet too much is at stake in the lucrative business and the British Foreign Secretary has ordered the colonial government in India to assemble an expeditionary force for an attack to reinstate the trade. Among those consigned is Kesri Singh, a soldier in the army of the East India Company. He makes his way eastward on the Hind, a transport ship that will carry him from Bengal to Hong Kong.Along the way, many characters from the Ibis Trilogy come aboard, including Zachary Reid, a young American speculator in opium futures, and Shireen, the widow of an opium merchant whose mysterious death in China has compelled her to seek out his lost son. The Hind docks in Hong Kong just as war breaks out and opium 'pours into the market like monsoon flood.' From Bombay to Calcutta, from naval engagements to the decks of a hospital ship, among embezzlement, profiteering, and espionage, Amitav Ghosh charts a breathless course through the culminating moment of the British opium trade and vexed colonial history.With all the verve of the first two novels in the trilogy, Flood of Fire completes Ghosh's unprecedented reenvisioning of the nineteenth-century war on drugs. With remarkable historic vision and a vibrant cast of characters, Ghosh brings the Opium Wars to bear on the contemporary moment with the storytelling that has charmed readers around the world.

Amitav Ghosh (Author), Raj Ghatak (Narrator)

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River of Smoke

The Ibis, loaded to its gunwales with a cargo of indentured servants, is in the grip of a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal; among the dozens flailing for survival are Neel, the pampered raja who has been convicted of embezzlement; Paulette, the French orphan masquerading as a deck-hand; and Deeti, the widowed poppy grower fleeing her homeland with her lover, Kalua. The storm also threatens the clipper ship Anahita, groaning with the largest consignment of opium ever to leave India for Canton. And the Redruth, a nursery ship, carries Frederick "Fitcher" Penrose, a horticulturist determined to track down the priceless treasures of China that are hidden in plain sight: its plants that have the power to heal, or beautify, or intoxicate. All will converge in Canton's Fanqui-town, or Foreign Enclave: a tumultuous world unto itself where civilizations clash and sometimes fuse. It is a powder keg awaiting a spark to ignite the Opium Wars. Spectacular coincidences, startling reversals of fortune, and tender love stories abound. But this is much more than an irresistible page-turner. The blind quest for money, the primacy of the drug trade, the concealment of base impulses behind the rhetoric of freedom: in River of Smoke the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries converge, and the result is a consuming historical novel with powerful contemporary resonance. Critics praised Sea of Poppies for its vibrant storytelling, antic humor, and rich narÂ¬rative scope; now Amitav Ghosh continues the epic that has charmed and compelled readers all over the globe. PRAISE FOR River of Smoke "On one level, [River of Smoke] is a remarkable feat of research, bringing alive the hybrid customs of food and dress and the competing philosophies of the period with intimate precision; on another it is a subversive act of empathy, viewing a whole panorama of world history from the 'wrong' end of the telescope. The real trick, though, is that it is also fabulously entertaining." -Tim Adams, The Observer (London) "Eloquent . . . Fascinating . . . [River of Smoke's] strength lies in how thoroughly Ghosh fills out his research with his novelistic fantasy, seduced by each new situation that presents itself and each new character, so that at their best the scenes read with a sensual freshness as if they were happening now." -Tessa Hadley, The Guardian "[This] vast book has a Dickensian sweep of characters, high- and low-life intermingling . . . Ghosh conjures up a thrilling sense of place." -The Economist

Amitav Ghosh (Author), Sanjiv Jhaveri (Narrator)

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The Circle of Reason

Amitav Ghosh's extraordinary first novel makes a claim on literary turf held by Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie. In a vivid and magical story, The Circle of Reason traces the misadventures of Alu, a young master weaver in a small Bengali village who is falsely accused of terrorism. Alu flees his home, traveling through Bombay to the Persian Gulf to North Africa with a bird-watching policeman in pursuit. "A remarkable storyteller, a Scheherezade effortlessly spinning tales within tales, the possessor of a strong narrative voice quite like no other." - Newsday "Ghosh's writing soars, producing electric images." - Baltimore Sun

Amitav Ghosh (Author), Simon Vance (Narrator)

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The Calcutta Chromosome

From Victorian India to near-future New York, The Calcutta Chromosome takes listeners on a wondrous journey through time as a computer programmer trapped in a mind-numbing job hits upon a curious item that will forever change his life. When Antar discovers the battered I.D. card of a long-lost acquaintance, he is suddenly drawn into a spellbinding adventure across centuries and around the globe, into the strange life of L. Murugan, a man obsessed with the medical history of malaria, and into a magnificently complex world where conspiracy hangs in the air like mosquitoes on a summer night.

Amitav Ghosh (Author), Simon Vance, Simon Vance (Narrator)

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In an Antique Land

Once upon a time an Indian writer named Amitav Ghosh set out to find an Indian slave, name unknown, who some seven hundred years before had traveled to the Middle East. The journey took him to a small village in Egypt, where medieval customs coexist with twentieth-century desires and discontents. But even as Ghosh sought to re-create the life of his Indian predecessor, he found himself immersed in those of his modern Egyptian neighbors. Combining shrewd observations with painstaking historical research, Ghosh serves up skeptics and holy men, merchants and sorcerers. Some of these figures are real, some only imagined, but all emerge as vividly as the characters in a great novel. In an Antique Land is an inspired work that transcends genres as deftly as it does eras, weaving an entrancing and intoxicating spell.

Amitav Ghosh (Author), Simon Vance (Narrator)

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The Shadow Lines

Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Ghosh's radiant second novel follows two families - one English, one Bengali - as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian-born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, through years of Bengali partition and violence, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives. The Shadow Lines is a "stunning novel, a rare work that balances formal ingenuity, heart, and mind" - New Republic

Amitav Ghosh (Author), Raj Varma (Narrator)

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The Glass Palace

Set in Burma during the British invasion of 1885, this masterly novel tells the story of Rajkumar, a poor boy lifted on the tides of political and social chaos, who goes on to create an empire in the Burmese teak forest. When soldiers force the royal family out of the Glass Palace and into exile, Rajkumar befriends Dolly, a young woman in the court of the Burmese Queen, whose love will shape his life. He cannot forget her, and years later, as a rich man, he goes in search of her. The struggles that have made Burma, India, and Malaya the places they are today are illuminated in this wonderful novel by the writer Chitra Divakaruni calls "a master storyteller." "I will never forget the young and old Rajkumar, Dolly, the Princesses, the forests of teak, the wealth that made families and wars. A wonderful novel. An incredible story." - Grace Paley "A rich, layered epic that probes the meaning of identity and homeland- a literary territory that is as resonant now, in our globalized culture, as it was when the sun never set on the British Empire." - Los Angeles Times Book Review "A novelist of dazzling ingenuity." - San Francisco Chronicle

Amitav Ghosh (Author), Simon Vance (Narrator)

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Sea of Poppies

At the heart of this vibrant saga is an immense ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, its purpose to fight China's vicious nineteenth-century Opium Wars. As for the crew, they are a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a free-spirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races, and generations. The vast sweep of this historical adventure embraces the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the crowded backstreets of Canton. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, that makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive - a masterpiece from one of the world's finest novelists. "Such is the power of Ghosh's precise, understated prose that one occasionally wishes to turn the pages three at a time, eager to find out where Ghosh's tale is headed." - The Boston Globe

Amitav Ghosh (Author), Phil Gigante (Narrator)

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The Hungry Tide

Off the easternmost corner of India, in the Bay of Bengal, lies the immense labyrinth of tiny islands known as the Sundarbans, where settlers live in fear of drowning tides and man-eating tigers. Piya Roy, a young American marine biologist of Indian descent, arrives in this lush, treacherous landscape in search of a rare species of river dolphin and enlists the aid of a local fisherman and a translator. Together the three of them launch into the elaborate backwaters, drawn unawares into the powerful political undercurrents of this isolated corner of the world that exact a personal toll as fierce as the tides.

Amitav Ghosh (Author), Firdous Bamji (Narrator)

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