ISBN: 9780143066507    Publisher: Penguin Year of publishing: 2009     Format:  Paperback No of Pages: 457        Language: English

Winner of the Prix Medici Etranger Award. Following the form of the raga in Indian classical music, Amitav Ghosh slowly builds the tempo of The Circle of Reason. The first part spans several decades, the second unfolds over a few weeks, and the third, like a scherzo, races through a day. Ghosh's debut novel centers on Alu, an orphan enlisted by his foster father as a soldier in his crusade against the forces of myth and unreason. Suspected of terrorism, they are about to be arrested when a tragic accident forces Alu to flee his village. Pursued by a misguided police officer, Alu finds his way through Calcutta to Goa and on to a trawler that runs illegal immigrants to Africa. Tracing Alu's journey across two continents, The Circle of Reason is an exceptional novel by one of India's most celebrated writers in English.
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Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and raised and educated in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Egypt, India and the United Kingdom, where he received his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Oxford. Acclaimed for fiction, travel writing and journalism, his books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In an Antique Land and Dancing in Cambodia. His previous novel, The Glass Palace, was an international bestseller that sold more than a half-million copies in Britain. Recently published there, The Hungry Tide has been sold for translation in twelve foreign countries and is also a bestseller abroad. Ghosh has won France's Prix Medici Etranger, India's prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Pushcart Prize. He now divides his time between Harvard University, where he is a visiting professor and his homes in India and Brooklyn, New York.
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