You can always guarantee a good solid story when you pick up a book by Amitav Ghosh and this is no exception. It’s a magical tale, one made up from legends, fantasy and full of magical realism too. Locations switch from India, Venice and Los Angeles on a trail for something elusive and rare..

However, where this book is clever is the way it also manages to highlight serious issues such as climate change and immigration in such a lyrical way, you really sit up and take notice. It’s quite a slow read as the story jumps from one place and time to another, there’s flashbacks and historical snippets throughout, but the picture builds to reveal a full and colourful narrative.


It read like a journey of discovery, a colonial adventure and in many ways it was. Deen is an outsider in both countries he visits. Living in New York, he travels to India and Venice and finds himself in places his Bengali heritage is called into question even amongst the Bengali communties there.

The Indian set parts were the most fascinating as the story seemed to change when he got to Venice. It got a bit more serious and the story of legends didn’t feel as strong or connected here. When he went to the Sundarbans, I was transfixed. This was a place of local legends and he meets many people along the way who will all have some impact or relevance on his own life.

This was a novel of two sides, of two halves. One a novel about travel, migration and wanting to belong, and the other, a tale of heritage, history and looking within yourself. Merged together, it’s quite a story.
And that elusive Gun Island will fascinate me for a long time to come.

I love Gosh's writing anyway, and this book didn't disappoint me. It was a very well told tale of a man's finding himself. It's very rich, covering many contemporary issues, many different characters, stories in the story.

I loved the writing and how Gosh is masterfully waves everything together.
If you're a literary fiction lover, it's a must read.

Thanks a lot to the publisher and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I think the best way to describe this book would be compelling. I found it compelling enough to carry on to the end as I was intrigued as to what would happen, but also what it was all about too - because it was quite easy to lose track once the protagonist made their way to Venice...

It felt like a book of two halves, with the first half keeping you gripped with the author's fantastic story telling seeming to weave a nice story with a compelling outcome to come. Sadly it didn't really materialise.

Whilst the story itself didn't feel complete, the author's style was great in certain threads of the tale. There are parts where you're left wanting to know more around certain character's journeys, but there's also bits - especially when it comes to the environmental/mystical elements where it confounds a little.

When I was thinking about how I'd describe it, I figured it was a mix between an Inconvenient Truth, A Life of Pi and a Merchant of Venice. The best parts of it came during the India/Bangladesh part of the book, with the Venetian elements becoming a bit of a drag and some of the coincidental meetings feeling a bit sharp and sudden.

In essence, Gun Island is a classic tale of a man finding himself through adventure and encounters with others only Ghosh is a master storyteller and the novel is an inventive and contemporary reimagining of an old-school adventure yarn, linking legends and folk tales with immigration and climate change through a wonderful cast of characters.

Deen, the main character is a middle-aged rare book dealer, originally from Kolkata, now living in New York. Mild mannered and straight laced, on a visit to Kolkata, Deen reluctantly indulges an old auntie and visits Sundarbans, the birthplace of a lesser known local legend. This visit introduces him to a number of characters connected to the place – from a young fisherman eking existence in the shadow of a forgotten temple to a marine biologist concerned with the falling numbers of Irrawaddy dolphins. Over time, the lives of the people Deen encountered in Sundarbans become more interconnected with his own as the story shifts to Los Angeles where local firefighters struggle to bring spreading wildfires under control and to Venice full of Bangladeshi immigrants threatened by tightening immigration laws.

Deen is familiar with the history of the subcontinent but, having emigrated to the US a long time ago, is somewhat out of touch with the present. So, as in other novels of Ghosh’s that I’ve read, there is a postcolonial element. At times, I wandered why Ghosh created a bit of a boring main character but seen in this context, Deen becomes enriched through the encounters with the locals in Sundarbans and later with Bangladeshi immigrants in Venice – people he wouldn’t have normally had any interest in but now forms meaningful relationships with.

Gun Island could be read as a contemporary inversion of the classic Victorian colonial adventure and Deen as a sort of inverted Conan Doyle or Rider Haggard hero. This is, however, just one element in a richly textured novel. Migration and displacement are another, the suffering and hardship of people crossing the Mediterranean in search of a better life in Europe increasingly deaf to their pleas. And so is the plight of animals, their irregular behaviour caused by changing weather patterns, pollution and climate change. At the same time and despite dealing with these heavy themes, Gun Island was a pleasure to read and is not without hope.

On occasion I found Deen’s ignorance of history (he has a Phd in early Bengali folklore) a little bit clumsy, done only as a lead into exposition by one or another character but apart from that, I thought Gun Island very good. I haven’t read The Hungry Tide but will do since it features some of the characters from Gun Island when they were younger.

My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review Gun Island.