India, March 8 -- There is something gently disconcerting about the opening movement of Ghost-Eye. A child asks for fish. The request is unremarkable, except that it occurs in a household where fish is forbidden, and except that the child insists she remembers eating it before, in another life, beside another river, with another mother. The moment is small, domestic, almost casual. Yet from this unassuming disturbance begins a novel that is less interested in spectacle than in the slow undoing of certainty.

Amitav Ghosh returns to fiction here with a manner that is quieter than much of his recent work. The novel does not announce its concerns loudly. It allows them to surface gradually, through habits of speech, remembered tastes and fra...