Mapped
The Glass Palace
Amitav Ghosh
Ghosh's saga opens in 1885 as the British storm the royal palace at Mandalay and depose the last Burmese king, and follows the orphan Rajkumar, who rises from that day's chaos to a teak fortune, across three generations and three countries. Burma is the heart: the Glass Palace and the sack of Mandalay, and the teak port of Rangoon. Beyond it lie the Indian town of Ratnagiri, where the exiled king is held, and the rubber estates of Malaya where the family's later fortunes are made and broken.
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The Hungry Tide
Amitav Ghosh
In the Sundarbans, the vast tide country of mangrove islands where the Ganges meets the sea, an American cetologist, Piya, a Delhi translator, Kanai, and an illiterate fisherman, Fokir, are drawn together among the shifting channels, the tigers and the river dolphins. Ghosh maps the real delta: the railhead at Canning, the island settlement of Lusibari and its trust, the tidal creeks where the dolphins gather, and Morichjhanpi, where refugees were massacred in 1979.
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The Shadow Lines
Amitav Ghosh
Ghosh's narrator remembers a divided subcontinent from a house in south Calcutta, where the streets around Gole Park and the lake hold a family's ordinary life. Memory then jumps the borders the novel calls shadow lines, west to the Prices' London and east to a grandmother's Dhaka, where the 1964 riots turn distance into loss. The map is anchored here in Calcutta, with those two waypoints reaching beyond it.
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