Cassie McCullagh

And also to Foggy London that is changing shape in Gwendolyn Riley's The Palm House.

Our reviewer is musician Tim Rogers.

Amitav Ghosh writes both fiction and non-fiction.

His books include The Great Derangement, Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Dancing in Cambodia and at Large in Burma, and also the novels The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide and Gun Island.

So we begin in Calcutta in 1969.

And Kate, that first chapter is pretty much perfect.

Well, go on.

Yeah, okay.

But the most exciting thing happens on the next page when three-year-old Varsha, the little daughter of the son of the patriarch Gupta, announces, I want rice and fish.

Give me some fish.

And a moment later, as if to underline the urgency of her demand, she says in Bengali,

And she says the same thing.

I won't try to massacre that language with my pronunciation.

But this child who has never eaten fish in a household that doesn't have any animal products in it, not one drop of milk, not one... Egg.

Egg, nothing.

Suddenly, not only demanding that she wants fish, she wants to eat it right now.

She goes on a hunger strike.

Yes, because initially the finger gets pointed at her Bengali maid who looks after her, her substitute mother.

But no, she, it seems, has experienced fish and she appears to be the reincarnation of somebody else.

So...