Amitav Ghosh's young narrator traverses the shaky planes of recollection as he grows up, disregarding geographical, political, and historical boundaries as he does so. But as he gets older, an apparently random act of violence haunts him. He constructs a complex, interwoven vision of the world where borders and limits are merely shadow lines that we build to divide people and nations out of tidbits of stories that are both half-remembered and imagined. Amitav Ghosh weaves a dense web of memories, connections, and images into a novel that is incredibly vivid, hilarious, and moving.