The Shadow Lines

As a boy, Amitav Ghosh’s narrator travels across time, experiencing different worlds, all brought to life by the tales of those around him. Set against a backdrop of war and strife, each story becomes an extension of his life. Through them he traverses the unreliable planes of memory, unmindful of physical, political and chronological borders.

But as he grows older, he is haunted by a seemingly random act of violence. Bits and pieces of stories, both half-remembered and imagined, come together in his mind until he arrives at an intricate, interconnected picture of the world where borders and boundaries mean nothing, mere shadow lines that we draw dividing people and nations.

Out of a miraculously complex web of memories, relationships and images, Amitav Ghosh builds an intensely vivid, funny and moving story. He questions the meaning of political freedom and the force of nationalism in the modern world. Exposing the idea of the nation state as an illusion, an arbitrary dissection of people, Ghosh reveals the absurd manner in which your home can suddenly become your enemy.