Ghost Eye

April 27, 2026 Leave a comment

Author: Amitav Ghosh | 336 Pages | Genre: Fiction | Publisher: HarperCollins | Year: 2025 | My Rating: 8/10

“Seems to me that you’ve gotta be in a place you know well, and if that place knows you too, it’ll help you.”
― Amitav Ghosh, Ghost Eye

Ghost Eye by Amitav Ghosh is an intriguing addition to his body of work, blending his characteristic climate change concerns with elements of magical realism, memory, and metaphysical inquiry. Known for novels such as The Shadow Lines, River of Smoke and Jungle Nama, Ghosh has consistently explored the intersections of history, migration, and environment. In Ghost-Eye, he extends this exploration into more experimental terrain, weaving together reincarnation, psychological investigation, and climate activism into a multi-layered non-linear narrative that spans continents and decades.

At the heart of the novel lies a deceptively simple yet deeply unsettling premise of a young girl named Varsha Gupta, raised in a strict vegetarian Marwari household in late-1960s Calcutta, who suddenly insists on eating fish, which is entirely alien to her upbringing. More disturbingly, she claims to remember a past life in which fish was part of her staple diet, suggesting that she may be a ‘case of the reincarnation type.’ This premise immediately situates the novel within a liminal space between rationality and spiritual belief, a tension that drives much of the narrative.

In the early sections of the book, Ghosh meticulously constructs the world of the Gupta household, capturing the cultural rigidity and social milieu of Calcutta’s elite Marwari community. The disruption caused by Varsha’s insistence on fish is not merely dietary but existential as it challenges the family’s worldview and opens a door to questions they are ill-equipped to answer. Enter Dr Shoma Bose, a psychologist studying reincarnation cases, whose rational framework is gradually destabilised by Varsha’s revelations. Through Shoma, Ghosh explores the limits of scientific reasoning when confronted with phenomena that resist empirical categorisation.

What elevates Ghost Eye beyond a simple psychological mystery is its expansive temporal and spatial scope. The narrative moves fluidly between 1960s Calcutta, Sundarbans, and contemporary Brooklyn, where the story resurfaces decades later through Shoma’s nephew, Dinu. This dual timeline allows Ghosh to play with past and present, tradition and modernity, belief and scepticism. The transition is seamless, and the intergenerational narrative adds depth to the central mystery, transforming it into a broader meditation on memory and continuity.

Ghosh uses the motif of reincarnation not merely as a plot device but as a lens through which to examine ecological and ethical questions. The idea of cyclical existence mirrors the cycles of nature, suggesting an interconnectedness between human lives and the environment. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that Varsha’s story is linked to larger concerns about environmental degradation and climate change. The involvement of environmental activists in the latter part of the novel underscores this connection, tying the metaphysical elements of the story to urgent real-world issues.

Ghosh’s descriptions of Calcutta and the Sundarbans are vivid and immersive, evoking a strong sense of place. The sensory richness in the depiction of food, landscapes, and everyday life grounds the more fantastical elements of the narrative, making them feel plausible within the world he has created. The novel’s magical realism is subtle rather than overt, emerging organically from the characters’ experiences rather than being imposed upon them.While the buildup is compelling and the thematic layers are rich, the ending feels somewhat rushed and less satisfying than the preceding narrative. The resolution of the central mystery, which promises a profound revelation, instead arrives with a sense of abruptness, leaving some threads insufficiently explored. Despite this limitation, Ghost Eye succeeds in pushing the boundaries of Ghosh’s narrative style. It represents a departure from his more historically anchored novels, venturing into speculative and metaphysical boundaries between science and spirituality, memory and imagination, human life and the natural world. The blending of genres creates a unique reading experience that is both engaging and thought-provoking. 

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Small Things Like These

March 23, 2026 Leave a comment

Author: Claire Keegan | 128 Pages | Genre: Historical Fiction | Publisher: Faber and Faber | Year: 2021 | My Rating: 8/10

“Do you mind telling me where this road will take me?’ “This road?” The man put down the hook and leant on the handle, and stared in at him. “This road will take you wherever you want to go, son.”
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is an unassuming and compassionate novella that explores moral courage within the mundane rhythms of everyday life. When you first hold the book, its title suggests humility as it refers to small acts and ordinary details that weave our lives together. Yet beneath this gentle exterior lies a story both sharp and deep, one that questions societal complicity, personal responsibility, and the price of kindness in a world full of indifference. A film was also released by the same name in 2024, directed by Tim Mielants.
 
Set in Ireland in the mid-1980s, the story follows Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man whose weekly routines revolve around delivering coal to his community in the run-up to Christmas. Bill is a practical, hardworking man with a keen eye for details—both in his business dealings and in the lives of those around him. Keegan’s prose is spare but richly textured as she describes the world through Bill’s grounded perspective, allowing the setting to emerge organically as both familiar and austere.
 
The power of this book lies in its focus on the ordinary. Bill’s days are a series of small tasks that include fetching sacks of coal, repairing fences, observing the changing weather, and spending evenings with his children. Yet it is precisely through these simple moments that Keegan reveals the deeper struggles of her characters and the moral quandaries they face. Her writing shimmeringly captures the texture of lives lived where dignity and survival are in constant negotiation.
 
The crux of the narrative begins when Bill, on his routine deliveries, encounters the Magdalene Laundry, which is an institution that, in real-world history, incarcerated thousands of women labelled as wayward or sinful, forcing them into unpaid labour. In Keegan’s fictional rendering, the institution stands as an imposing, monolithic presence with walls that seem to hold secrets as impenetrable as the silence that surrounds it. When Bill witnesses a young woman in distress, that unsettles him; he is forced to confront realities he has long chosen to ignore. What follows is a quiet yet wrenching moral reckoning.
 
Keegan doesn’t rely on grand gestures or dramatic flourishes to convey her message. Instead, she invites the reader into Bill’s personal life, which unfolds with the careful precision of a meditative revelation. Bill’s internal struggle between comfort and conscience, between the safety of silence and the peril of truth, is the emotional anchor of the story. In a world where systems of power routinely subjugate the vulnerable, Bill’s hesitations, doubts, and ultimately his decisions illuminate the complexity of acting with integrity.
 
One of the most remarkable aspects of Keegan’s writing is her ability to render deeply serious themes without didacticism. The novella grapples with historical injustices, patriarchal structures, and collective negligence, yet it never feels preachy. Keegan trusts her readers to recognise the moral gravity of the situation. Bill’s interactions with those around him further enrich the novella’s emotional landscape. His relationships with his wife, his children, and his neighbours are tenderly drawn, with each character feeling textured, whole, and real. Through these interactions, Keegan shows how communal life can be both nourishing and fraught, underscoring how easily people can slip into patterns of complacency when confronting uncomfortable truths. The warmth of Bill’s home life stands in stark contrast to the chilling secrecy of the laundry, amplifying the moral dissonance at the heart of the story.
 
Keegan’s storytelling is musical, and her sentences are shaped with an almost tactile precision. The Irish landscape, with its grey skies, barren fields, and wind-scoured streets, becomes more than a backdrop and a character in its own right, reflecting the internal desolation and flickers of hope within Bill’s journey. Reading this book is an immersive experience, inviting you to slow down, to notice the small details, to attend to the silences between the lines.
 
At its core, the novella asks a deceptively simple question that what does it mean to be a good person in a world that often rewards self-interest over compassion? Bill Furlong’s story suggests that there are no easy answers, but that even modest acts of courage like speaking up, offering help, acknowledging another’s suffering can ripple outward in ways that matter. This thematic focus on the ‘small things’ resonates with the narrative’s tonal restraint, generating a quiet but persistent emotional force.
 
Some readers may find the novella’s deliberate pacing and understated plot challenging, especially those accustomed to more overtly dramatic narratives. However, it is precisely this unhurried approach that allows Keegan’s thematic concerns to take root. The quiet accumulation of detail replicates the way real moral awakening often unfolds incrementally, through moments of discomfort and reflection rather than sudden epiphany.
 
This book is a remarkable work of moral fiction that lingers long after reading. Claire Keegan has crafted a narrative that is both intimate and expansive, one that honours the ordinary while confronting extraordinary ethical dilemmas. Through Bill Furlong’s quiet courage, Keegan reminds us that the small things, like acts of attention, care, and conscience, are often the ones that define us. It is a novella of great compassion and moral clarity, worthy of contemplation by anyone invested in the possibilities of human kindness amid enduring social wounds.

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Birthday Stories

February 22, 2026 Leave a comment

Edited by Haruki Murakami | 224 Pages | Genre: Fiction | Publisher: Vintage Books | Year: 2006 | My Rating: 8/10

“No matter how far you go, you can never be anything but yourself”
― Haruki Murakami, Birthday Stories

I’ve always loved receiving books on my birthdays, as far back as I can remember. When I was in elementary and middle school, my parents used to gift me books, and for several years, since I can recall, I often used my saved pocket money to buy myself the best books, something I still do on my birthdays. On my last birthday in 2025, a few friends and family members gifted me books that could keep me occupied for six months. Among them was “Birthday Stories” by Haruki Murakami. What an amazing way to start my birthday year!

Something is mesmerising about beginning a new year of one’s life with a book that itself revolves around birthdays, those strange markers of time when we pause, introspect and reflect, and sometimes feel the weight of becoming. Birthday Stories is not a novel by Murakami in the conventional sense, but a curated collection of short stories written by various authors, commissioned by Murakami for the Japanese magazine Monkey. The book is a rich anthology that explores how a single day in one’s life can hold joy, dread, memory, regret, longing, and transformation.

A birthday is such a universal ritual of cake, candles, wishes, gifts, and phone calls. Yet, through these 13 stories, the birthday becomes a moment where ordinary life tilts, revealing hidden fractures or unexpected openings. Some stories are gentle and reflective, others unsettling, a few laced with humour or quiet absurdity. As a reader beginning a personal ‘birthday year’ of reading, I found myself slipping into these stories with a peculiar intimacy, as if each one was asking me to examine my own relationship with time and personal evolution.

Murakami’s presence is felt more as a curator than as a dominating voice, which is refreshing. He resists the temptation to turn the anthology into a showcase of ‘Murakami-esque’ surrealism. Instead, he assembles a diverse range of voices that are playful, melancholic, and even experimental. The result is a collage of sensibilities that mirrors the many ways people experience birthdays, often not as a single emotion, but as a spectrum of moods. This diversity keeps the collection from becoming repetitive. Each story feels like a different room in the same house of memory and anticipation.

One of the pleasures of Birthday Stories is how subtly it captures the loneliness that can accompany birthdays. Even when surrounded by people, birthdays can heighten our awareness of time passing, unmet expectations, and relationships that have shifted gears. Several stories linger in this emotional space, portraying characters who are quietly dislocated on their special day. A birthday becomes a reminder of what has not happened as much as what has. This emotional undercurrent resonated deeply with me. Birthdays, after all, are checkpoints reviewing the year that has finished, and not just celebrations. They ask uncomfortable questions, like ‘where am I in my life? What have I become since the last candle was blown out?’

The collection of stories has a playfulness about it, a recognition that birthdays can be absurd social performances. Some stories gently mock the rituals we perform around ageing: the forced cheer, the obligatory gratitude, the awkward gifts. Others find wonder in small moments of a conversation, a remembered taste, a fleeting encounter that feels more meaningful than any grand celebration. This balance between lightness and introspection makes the book an easy yet thoughtful read. 

The anthology format also invites a particular kind of reading rhythm. I found myself reading one story at a time, allowing each to settle, and eventually taking 13 weeks to complete the book. It felt like savouring my favourite Lindt Intense Orange, one piece at a time. In doing so, Birthday Stories began to feel less like a book to be finished and more like a companion to the year ahead with short meditations on time, chance, and the quiet dramas of ordinary lives. It suited the idea of a reading calendar stretching over weeks, not rushing through but returning to in small, reflective doses.

Reading Birthday Stories at the start of my birthday year felt quietly symbolic. It reminded me that growing older is not a singular narrative of progress or decline, but a series of small, often unnoticed stories we accumulate. Some are strange, some tender, some unresolved. Murakami’s editorial touch brings these fragments together on how time moves through us. The book does not offer grand revelations about ageing or purpose; it brings an honest recognition of the ordinary magic and quiet unease that accompany the simple act of marking another year lived. In that sense, Birthday Stories was the perfect birthday gift. Not because it dazzled with literary fireworks, but because it sat beside me, nudging me to notice the emotional textures of passing time. As the months of my reading calendar unfold, I don’t think I will remember this book less for specific plots and more for the reflective awareness it left me with that every birthday, like every story, is a small doorway into who we are becoming.

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Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

November 17, 2025 Leave a comment

Author: Margaret Atwood | 240 Pages | Genre: Non-Fiction | Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC | Year: 2008 | My Rating: 8/10

“Without debt, there would be no such thing as credit, and without credit, economies would not exist. But equally, without debt, there would be no such thing as forgiveness.”

-Margaret Atwood, Payback

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth was originally presented as the Massey Lectures in 2008. It is not a book about economics in the traditional sense, as it does not include balance sheets, market trends, or policy prescriptions. Instead, it is a work of literary and moral imagination, a wide-ranging meditation on what debt means, which is not only as a financial construct but as a moral, psychological, and even mythical one. Atwood has shared an idea that governs much of modern life, the idea of owing and being owed. The book’s tone is conversational yet filled with insights, blending history, literature, religion, and personal reflection. It says that debt is an idea that is created by humanity, and that it is closely connected to our concepts of justice, sin, and morality. 

The book is structured into five chapters: Ancient Balances, Debt and Sin, The Shadow Side, Payback, and Payback: The Shadow Side. Each chapter explores debt from a different perspective—cultural, literary, economic, and ecological, slowly building toward a conclusion about the balance between taking and giving, destruction and renewal.

The book traces the origins of debt to ancient times, where it was not only a financial but also a moral and spiritual one. In many cultures, debt has been synonymous with guilt. For example, the language of ‘redemption’ and ‘forgiveness’ in Christianity has deep economic roots. This moral overlap is not accidental. Instead, it reflects a psychological need for balance, for settling accounts not only in terms of money but in life.

Ancient systems of justice were often modelled on an eye for an eye, or a life for a life. The idea of fairness was inherently transactional. Thus, debt becomes a metaphor for all human obligations, between individuals, between human beings and gods, and eventually between humanity and the planet. Therefore, economic debt, moral guilt, and ecological imbalance all stem from the same root: the failure to honour reciprocity.

Atwood moves seamlessly through the Bible, Shakespeare, Dickens, Marlowe, and even pop culture, treating each as a kind of moral ledger. Ebenezer Scrooge, the most famous debtor and creditor in fiction, becomes a recurring figure. She also references Dr. Faustus, who sells his soul to the devil as a literal debt contract. Debt stories are also about identity, who owes whom, and what kind of person it makes you to owe or to be owed. These examples highlight how debt has long served as a narrative to explore human frailty, justice, and redemption.

In the third chapter, ‘The Shadow Side,’ Atwood dives into the psychology of debt and how it can enslave, corrupt, and distort. She talks about Jung’s idea of the hidden moral darkness within every person and society. In this way, debt is like the shadow side of wealth, showing the unseen costs of accumulating riches. Atwood uses historical examples, from debtors’ prisons in Victorian England to the 2008 global financial crisis, to show how societies often ignore moral responsibility. When people or institutions borrow more than they can handle, they’re not just taking financial risks but moral ones too. The book, published just before the 2008 crash, eerily predicts the crisis that was about to happen. Modern capitalism relies on the constant creation of debt, which is both the system’s driving force and its curse. Debt is everywhere, yet we rarely stop to think about its harmful effects.

In the book’s final chapter, a contemporary ‘Scrooge Corporation’ is visited by the Spirit of Earth Day Future. This eco-fable weaves together Atwood’s arguments into a narrative of humanity’s reckoning with the natural world. The spirit unveils to Scrooge the dire consequences of his unbalanced ledger, which comprises a planet drained of resources, tainted by waste, and devoid of moral responsibility. By reinterpreting a well-known moral story through an ecological lens, the book compels the reader to understand that the language of debt is synonymous with the language of survival. When we speak of ‘owing the Earth’ or ‘repaying our debts to future generations,’ these expressions are not merely metaphorical, as they represent literal truths.

Atwood’s writing is witty, elegant, sharp and ironic. Her ability to seamlessly transition from ancient myths to modern finance is truly remarkable, and she always reminds the reader that behind every number, there’s a story. There are moments of satire, especially when she targets corporate greed or political hypocrisy, but also passages of lyrical reflection that showcase her poetic sensibility.

The book is a mix of essay, cultural history, and allegory. Its interdisciplinary approach mirrors the complexity of its subject. Debt isn’t just about economics; it shapes our moral and social worlds. However, Atwood’s digressions and literary references, while enlightening, can sometimes overwhelm readers who aren’t familiar with them. Each chapter feels like a conversation with a brilliant, slightly mischievous teacher who loves turning assumptions upside down. The book is a moral reckoning disguised as a literary essay. It’s a call to remember that every ledger, no matter how abstract, has a human cost. Atwood’s lesson through this book is that living ethically means recognizing one’s debts, not just in money, but in gratitude, care, and responsibility.

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