The Calcutta Chromosome

A fascinating and seductive writer!' -The Times In this extraordinary novel Amitav Ghosh navigates through time and genres to present a unique tale. Beginning at an unspecified time in the future and ranging back to the late nineteenth century the reader follows the adventures of the enigmatic L. Murugan. An authority on the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sir Ronald Ross who solved the malaria puzzle in Calcutta in 1898 Murugan is in search of the elusive 'Calcutta Chromosome'. With its astonishing range of characters advanced computer science religious cults and wonderful portraits of Victorian and contemporary India The Calcutta Chromosome expands the scope of the novel as we know it as Amitav Ghosh takes on the avatar of a science thriller writer. About the Author Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and raised and educated in Bangladesh Sri Lanka Iran Egypt India and the United Kingdom where he received his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Oxford. Acclaimed for fiction travel writing and journalism his books include The Circle of Reason The Shadow Lines In an Antique Land and Dancing in Cambodia. His previous novel The Glass Palace was an international bestseller that sold more than a half-million copies in Britain. Recently published there The Hungry Tide has been sold for translation in twelve foreign countries and is also a bestseller abroad. Ghosh has won France's Prix Medici Etranger India's prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Pushcart Prize. He now divides his time between Harvard University where he is a visiting professor and his homes in India and Brooklyn New York.