The 12 Best Amitav Ghosh Books, Ranked (With the Ibis Reading Order)

The narrator grows up in Calcutta on stories told by his older cousin Tridib, a man who has been to England and can describe places better than the people who live in them. The book moves without warning between decades, between an Indian family and an English one, and between a boy's imagination and what actually happened. Then it arrives at the violence of 1964, which the narrator lived through as a schoolboy and later cannot find in any newspaper archive. That search is the spine of the novel. Ghosh is asking what a border does to memory, and he asks it through people rather than theory.

The Ibis is a former slave ship, repurposed to carry indentured workers from Bihar to Mauritius, and Ghosh fills it with people who have nothing in common except that the opium trade has ruined them. Deeti runs from a village where the poppy has pushed out food crops. Neel Rattan Halder loses an estate and a title to a British contract he did not read carefully. Zachary Reid, a ship's carpenter from Baltimore, keeps getting promoted because nobody looks too closely at him. The pleasure is old fashioned: a ship, a storm, a jailbreak, and a crowd of voices all talking at once.

Piya Roy, a cetologist raised in America, comes to the Sundarbans to track river dolphins. Kanai Dutt, a translator from Delhi with a high opinion of himself, comes to read a notebook his dead uncle left behind. Between them stands Fokir, a fisherman who cannot read and knows the water better than any instrument. The tide country is the third character: mangrove islands that flood and reappear, tigers that take people every year, and a settlement cleared by the state in 1979 whose ghost sits under the whole book. Ghosh is writing about who gets to speak for a place, without turning it into a lecture.

It opens in 1885 with British troops walking King Thebaw and Queen Supayalat out of the palace and into exile in India, watched by Rajkumar, an orphaned Indian boy working at a food stall. He grows into a timber merchant. The novel then follows his family, and the family of Dolly, an attendant from the royal household, through teak camps in Burma, rubber estates in Malaya, and the Second World War, when Indian soldiers in the British army had to work out whose war they were fighting. This is Ghosh at his most nineteenth century, in the good sense: fortunes, marriages, betrayals, an ending you feel in your chest.

In the early 1980s Ghosh lived in two villages in the Nile delta as a young anthropologist, learning Arabic and being cross-examined daily by farmers about whether Indians really burn their dead. Braided into that is a piece of detective work. From letters preserved for centuries in a Cairo synagogue storeroom, he reconstructs the trading life of Abraham Ben Yiju, a Jewish merchant who lived and traded in Mangalore, and of Bomma, the Indian slave who worked with him. Two worlds, eight hundred years apart, both showing an Indian Ocean where people moved and mixed far more freely than the modern map suggests.

A storm scatters the cast of Sea of Poppies and the story picks up in Canton, in the foreign enclave where European and Indian traders lived under Chinese rules they mostly ignored. At the centre is Bahram Modi, a Parsi merchant who married into a Bombay shipbuilding family and wants one enormous score so he can finally be his own man. Around him are a plant hunter looking for a rare camellia, a painter's son writing gossipy letters home, and a Chinese commissioner arriving with orders to end the opium business for good. Less adventure than book one, and a much larger world.

Ghosh opens with a tornado that hit Delhi in 1978, which he walked through as a student, and admits he has never been able to put it in a novel because readers would find it unbelievable. From there he builds his case: the modern literary novel was trained to prefer the probable, so freak weather got pushed off to science fiction and thrillers, and the biggest story of our century has no room in the form. He then turns to history and to politics, on how Asia's part in the carbon story gets told wrong. It began as a set of lectures and it still moves like good talking.

Antar works alone in a New York apartment for a global bureaucracy, feeding old records into a machine, when a battered ID card surfaces belonging to a man called Murugan who disappeared in Calcutta. Murugan's obsession was Ronald Ross, the British doctor who worked out how malaria travels through mosquitoes, and his theory was that the discovery had been steered by Indian assistants running a secret counter-science of their own. The novel is part ghost story, part medical thriller, part conspiracy, and it refuses to explain itself at the end. Nothing else in his work sounds remotely like it.

Britain sends an expeditionary force to China to protect the opium business, and a large part of that force is Indian. Ghosh's route into the war is Kesri Singh, a career soldier and Deeti's brother, who has spent his life inside a regiment that is now being used as a debt collector. Around him the survivors return: a widow travelling to Canton to claim her late husband's estate, a former convict remaking himself under a new name, an American sailor drifting toward the worst version of himself. It ends where the trilogy was always heading, with a war won by the wrong side and an island called Hong Kong changing hands.

After a decade in the archives for three novels, Ghosh wrote the nonfiction version. It follows the poppy from the fields of Bihar to Chinese ports, and then follows the money: the Indian merchants who got rich, the British administration that ran a narcotics business as public policy, and the New England families whose polite old wealth started in the China trade. He keeps himself in the frame throughout, including what the research turned up about his own family's movements. Parts read like a travel book and parts like a charge sheet, and the two modes hold together better than they should.

In 1621 the Dutch East India Company took the Banda Islands by killing or enslaving most of the people living on them, because those islands held the world's nutmeg. Ghosh uses that as his opening parable and works outward from it, arguing that treating land as inert stuff to be emptied and used is not a modern accident but a habit four centuries old. He brings in indigenous ways of seeing the earth, the politics of the pandemic years, and the uncomfortable fact that plantation owners understood the planet as a machine long before anyone built one.

Deen Datta, a Brooklyn dealer in rare books, gets pulled into the legend of a merchant chased across the seas by the snake goddess Manasa Devi. The chase takes him to a shrine in the Sundarbans, then to Los Angeles during a wildfire, then to Venice, where young Bengali men who crossed half the world on foot and in boats are working the edges of the city. Piya from The Hungry Tide is here too. The real subject is migration on a heating planet, and the argument from The Great Derangement is visible in the machinery of the plot.