In An Antique Land

by Amitav Ghosh (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2012

  $13.51

  In an Antique Land is a subversive history in the guise of a traveller's tale. When the author stumbles across a slave narrative in the margins of an ancient text, his curiosity is piqued. What follows is a ten year search, which brings author and slave together across 800 hundred years of colonial history. Bursting with anecdote and exuberant detail, it offers a magical, intimate biography of the private life of a country, Egypt, from the Crusades to Operation Desert Storm.

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $4.73

  In the 1980s Amitav Ghosh moved into a converted chicken coop. It was on the roof of a house in Lataifa, a tiny village in Egypt. During the day he poured over medieval letters sent to India from Cairo by Arab merchants. In the evenings he shut out the bellowing of his fat landlord by turning up the volume of his transistor radio and wrote stories based on what he had seen in the village. The story of Khamees the Rat, the notorious impotent (already twice married); of Zaghloul the weaver determined to travel to India on a donkey; of one-eyed Mohammad, so obsessed with a girl that he spent nights kneeling outside her window to listen to the sound of her breathing; of Amm 'Taha, part-time witch, always ready to cast a spell for a little extra money; and, of course, the story of Amitav Ghosh himself, known in the village as the Indian doctor, the uncircumcised, cow-worshipping kaffir who would not convert to Islam. This book is the story of Amitav Ghosh's decade of intimacy with the village community. Mixing conversation and research, imagination and scholarship, it is also a charged, eccentric history of the special relationship between two countires, Egypt and India, through nearly ten centuries of parochialism and sympathy, bigotry and affection.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1992

  $33.91

  Travel writing is traditionally the domain of the European writer: it is the English, the French or the German writer who discovers the marsh Arabs in Iraq, the monks in Tibet, a violent tribe in South America. Amitav Ghosh is approaching travel writing in the spirit of a Third World writer writing about the Third World. His book begins with the time he spent in a small Egyptian village and the piece he wrote about the time there that appeared in Granta magazine, a story of the Imam of the village, of Khamees, of the teacher at the village and of all the squabbles and prejudices of the village.

• New

  Paperback
  1994

  $20.00