Amitav Ghosh

Now, Bengal is a riverine land, you know.

I mean, it's incredibly watery.

There are these incredibly powerful rivers flowing through all of Bengal.

And because of this, there are literally hundreds of different species of freshwater fish,

And people have a very powerful sense of connection with these fishes.

I mean, if you go to a Bangladeshi store, you're in Australia, I imagine.

Yes.

If you go to a Bangladeshi store, you'll see that there'll be a whole section of it.

completely dedicated to frozen fish from Bengal.

Bengalis everywhere are deeply, deeply attached to it.

I was just in Spain, and I remember driving, I was in a taxi going through Barcelona, and suddenly we passed a shop where it was written in Bengali, Bengali fish available here.

It was really so striking to me.

It's just a very important part of our culture.

That's right.

Is this a sequel or what is this?

I wouldn't say it's a sequel.

I certainly didn't have that in mind.

But there's certainly a kind of intertextuality, if you like.

Yeah, I just grew very attached to Dean's voice and to the kind of person that Dean is.

You know, I didn't start this book with Dean as such, but very soon it just, as I said, it wrote itself.