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Start giftingGun Island
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreFrom the award-winning author of the bestselling epic Ibis trilogy comes a globetrotting, folkloric adventure novel about family and heritage.
Bundook. Gun. A common word, but one that turns Deen Datta’s world upside down.
A dealer of rare books, Deen is used to a quiet life spent indoors. But as his once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is forced to set out on an extraordinary journey, one that takes him from India to Los Angeles and Venice via a tangled route through the memories and experiences of those he meets along the way. There is Piya, a fellow Bengali-American who sets his journey in motion; Tipu, an entrepreneurial young man who opens Deen’s eyes to the realities of growing up in today’s world; Rafi, with his desperate attempt to help someone in need; and Cinta, an old friend who provides the missing link in the story they are all a part of. It is a journey that will upend everything he thought he knew about himself, about the Bengali legends of his childhood, and about the world around him.
Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island is a beautifully realized novel that effortlessly spans space and time. It is the story of a world on the brink, of increasing displacement and unstoppable transition. But it is also a story of hope, of a man whose faith in the world and the future is restored by two remarkable women.
Amitav Ghosh is the internationally bestselling author of many works of fiction and nonfiction and he has received of numerous awards and prizes.
Reviews
“With sweeping exuberant style and extraordinary linguistic facility…this important novel is an account of our current world, the one few writers have had the courage to face.”
“A Bengali Da Vinci Code…Gun Island is a book of reckless and persuasive scope, a huge, rambunctious reckoning with our environmental declension.”
“Tales of escapology, of deprivation and persecution, of impossible yearnings for a new world that bring us, inexorably, to the terrified refugees on the Mediterranean. Which is, perhaps, Ghosh’s essential point.”
“Amitav Ghosh…wants literature to explore the environment as much as it does other crises.”
“Flitting across continents, Ghosh deftly summons up a pungent sense of place, whether in the mangrove swamps of Bengal or the misty, cobbled streets of Venice.”
“Deals with two of the biggest issues of the current moment: climate change and human migration. But it’s not homework…[it’s] a good, old-fashioned diversion around these particular poles…A book unafraid of ideas can be bracing.”
“With the melodic cadence of South Asian-accented English, Sagar Arya narrates this mystical novel…Arya provides colorful inflections for Deen and his various Asian-American friends who provide critical keys to unlocking the mystery he is pursuing.”
“A modern retelling of a Bengali myth. He believes old legends have a lot to teach us about how to think about the catastrophic effects of climate change.”
“Gun Island makes us wonder whether the warming planet can also revive premodern legends that lay buried in different cultures for extended time periods…What happens when age-old stories embedded in the permafrost of intergenerational memory suddenly thaw?”
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