![]() New Delhi businessman Kanai Dutt (creator of a thriving translation business) is visiting his aunt Nilima, and perusing the history (of the islands’ exploitation by “people who made a push to protect the wildlife here, without regard to the human costs,” and a failed utopian “revolution” waged by settlers and their sympathizers) contained in the journal of Kanai’s uncle Nirmal, a probable victim of political murder. ![]() ![]() Marine biologist Piya(la) Roy, raised in the United States by Indian parents, has come to the islands to study a rare and endangered marine species, the Irrawaddy dolphin. In a complex narrative filled with echoes of Naipaul and especially Conrad (with an occasional nod to Peter Matthiessen’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord), Anglo-Indian author Ghosh ( The Glass Palace, 2001, etc.) interweaves the fates of several natives and visitors to the pristine (if not primitive) Sundarban Islands in the Bay of Bengal. ![]() Outsiders are drawn into the exotic vortex of a remote Pacific archipelago. ![]()
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