The Hungry Tide

Fom the author of the glass palace, the widely-acclaimed bestseller the hungry tide is a rich, exotic saga set in calcutta and in the vast archipelago of islands in the bay of bengal 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 it is only when the ganges approaches the bay of bengal that it frees itself and separates into thousands of wandering strands 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 this vast archipelago of islands that provides the setting for amitav ghosh’s new novel 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 dense as the mangrove forests