Author: Amitav Ghosh
Publisher: Permanent Black
Year: 2000
Language: English
Pages: 393
ISBN/UPC (if available): 817530040X
Description
Now in paper back edition, this is another of Amitav Ghosh's books packed with anecdote and exuberant detail. It provides magical and intimate insights into Egypt from the Crusades to Operation Desert Storm.
‘In an Antique Land’ is subversive history in the guise of a traveler’s tale. Packed with anecdote and exuberant detail it provides magical and intimate insights into Egypt from the Crusades to Operation Desert Storm. It also offers vivid glimpses of the many small, indistinguishable and intertwining histories of India and Egypt, Muslims and Hindus and Jews.
This is another of Amitav Ghosh’s books that, characteristically, makes us rethink the political boundaries that divide up the world, and the generic boundaries that divide up narrative styles. With its deft and irreverent use of the devices of fiction, history, travel-writing and anthropology to create a single seamless work of the imagination, this book confirms that Amitav Ghosh is in a league of his own as an Indian Writer of English prose.
EXCERPTS FROM REVIEWS:
A remarkable book.
- New York Times
An astonishing and profoundly exciting book, it is the coming together of scholarship, history and anthropology, with literature. Intellectually thrilling, compelling.
- The Book Review
Contents
Prologue
Lataifa
Nashawy
Mangalore
Going Back
Epilogue
Notes