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Book Review - The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh


“How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a cupboard, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out or rediscovered?”

If you would ask me to describe this book in one word, it would be descriptive. There are so many details that your mind will explode. It will be like you are getting to know the geography of a region without being present in that location. The tales of the past adds spice to the story. Prima facie the book revolves around the coastal area of India and Bangladesh, Sunderbans and dolphins, but there is more to it. It talks about human interactions, the people you meet in your line of work and how they make you feel, what you have to go through to follow your dreams, how some people feel themselves superior that they forget to treat people in the right manner and what environmentalists and social servants do might not be in the best interest of everyone every time.

The story took off well, but I lost interest after some time and it felt like a chore to pick this up. Then, I needed a time out and went again, and it felt nice this time with all the intricate details of the current story and how it ties in with the old one. Every chapter feels like a memory from a lost time. It’s a beautiful book about love and human interactions. It tells you how fear will make you do things which you might have avoided otherwise and let you meet with your opposite self. Each character in the story is well crafted and has a proper space to grow, so you end up feeling towards few characters more than others.

Rating - 3.5/5

Genre- Historical Fiction

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