Thursday, Sept. 26, 7:30 pm
Grace-Trinity Community Church
1430 West 28th Street, Minneapolis

Join us as the award-winning author of the bestselling Ibis trilogy presents Gun Island (FSG), a globetrotting, folkloric adventure novel about family and heritage. This event is free and open to the public!

Gun Island and other Amitav Ghosh books will be available for purchase at the event courtesy of Magers & Quinn Booksellers, and the author will sign books.

About Gun Island

On a visit to his birthplace, Kolkata, a Brooklyn-based dealer in rare books finds his life becoming entangled with an ancient legend about the goddess of snakes, Manasa Devi. While visiting a temple, deep within the vast mangrove forests of Bengal, he has a disturbing encounter with the most feared, and revered, of Indian snakes, a King Cobra. This is followed by a series of increasingly uncanny episodes that seem to dissolve the borders of the human and non-human.

Peopled with a diverse cast of characters, and set in places that range from the Sundarbans to Los Angeles and Venice, Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island is a beautifully realized novel that effortlessly spans space and time. It is the story of a world on the brink, of increasing displacement and unstoppable transition. But it is also a story of hope, of a man whose faith in the world and the future is restored by two remarkable women.

“With sweeping exuberant style and extraordinary linguistic facility, Amitav Ghosh takes us into a world where desperate refugees trickle through borders like water from melting ice, but where massing animals find no escapes . . . This important novel is an account of our current world, the one few writers have had the courage to face.”
—Annie Proulx

“Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island is an extraordinary reading experience from one of our greatest living storytellers. Ghosh masterfully collocates disparate worlds to create a story of family, self, history, and destiny. I’m in awe.”
—Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others

About the author

Amitav Ghosh is the author of the acclaimed and bestselling Ibis trilogy, which includes Sea of Poppies (short-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize), River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire, all published by FSG. His other books include the novels The Circle of Reason, which won the Prix Médicis étranger, and The Glass Palace, as well as the 2016 nonfiction book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Ghosh was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian government in 2007, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009, and received the Jnanpith Award in 2019.