India, April 17 -- Amitav Ghosh's new novel Ghost Eye is foremost a love letter to fish - first celebrated in the deepest Bengali sense, culinarily, before being mourned ecologically.

In a wealthy strictly vegetarian Marwari family home, three-year-old Varsha Gupta, over lunch, demands fish and rice: Ami machh-bhat khabo. Machh dao, she declares, refusing to eat anything else. The family, part Jain, fully alarmed, summon a psychologist. Shoma specializes in "cases of the reincarnation type" - she had been helping an American professor, one of the world's leading experts in the field.

And so begins this vivid, visceral, deeply satisfying novel.

Varsha claims to be in her past life the daughter of a poor fishing family in the Sundarbans,...