"The Hungry Tide", the most recent book by Amitav Ghosh, author of excellent works like "The Calcutta Chromosome" and "In An Antique Land", is eerily well-timed.

'The river was like a pavement, lying at its feet, while its crest reared high above, dwarfing the tallest trees. It was a tidal wave, sweeping in from the sea; everything in its path disappeared as it came thundering towards them... But now it was as if death had announced its arrival and there was nothing to do but to wait for its arrival...'

The book deals with the indestructibility of the human spirit in the face of adversity. It also takes up the ecological disasters that threaten the last wildernesses on our little jewel drifting through space.

The Sunderbans are a vast delta with forests, swamps, tigers and rich bio-diversity to the south of Calcutta at the mouth of the river Ganga emptying into the Bay of Bengal. The forest is under threat because of denudation and human progress. In the British Raj, Sir Daniel Hamilton attempted to set up a sort of Utopia in the Sunderbans, but failed. Today, it is a beehive of activity, trade, fishermen and villagers, amidst the scenic beauty.

In the book, Piya Roy, an American marine biologist visits the Sunderbans to study the Orcaella, riverine dolphins who frequent the region. She has grown up in Seattle and is unexposed to the challenges of life in the wild, among the under-globalized. Her researches bring her into contact with the book's other major character, Kanai Dutt, an urban, urbane professional, who is visiting his aunt in an island in the Sunderbans to discover the life he left behind.

His uncle, wonsuponatime a Socialist revolutionary, retreated to the villages and became headmaster of a village school. He has left his memoirs to his nephew, and the tale of a life lived through passion, strife and striving. Kanai, searching for his own true identity, is attracted to Piya, and accompanies her on a trip through the Sunderbans, along with their boatman, Fokir, a simple illiterate villager, who is more in tune with nature and life than his boatmates.

The trip is a journey of the mind, the heart and the spirit. The urban sensitivities of the protagonists, who come from a structured, black and white world are confronted with a fluid, everchanging environment, reshaped daily by the 'hungry tides', where tigers kill villagers by the hundreds, but if a tiger is killed by a villager, the government metes out punishment for killing a representative of an endangered species.