Amitav Ghosh

From Victorian lndia to near-future New York, The Calcutta Chromosome takes readers on a wondrous journey through time as a computer programmer trapped in a mind-numbing job hits upon a curious item that will forever change his life. When Antar discovers the battered I.D. card of a long-lost acquaintance, he is suddenly drawn into a spellbinding adventure across centuries and around the globe, into the strange life of L. Murugan, a man obsessed with the medical history of malaria, and into a magnificently complex world where conspiracy hangs in the air like mosquitoes on a summer night.

A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery

The Calcutta Chromosome

Prashanth Srivatsa

Rarely do books on malaria and malicious mosquitoes keep you at the edge of your seat. Ghosh, with his mastery over complex narratives and an unyielding nationalistic fervor, achieves this in sublime fashion. There's a gradual dissection of the Western dominance at play here, and through the cat and mouse chase, riddled with transcendence, immortality, Indian superstitions and a disturbing view of science and knowledge, Ghosh finds comfort and removes misconceptions in the heart of Calcutta. But perhaps, despite all of it, it's too complex.

Nicole Dykeman

This was just not for me. So much of it went over my head/didn’t make sense. It was boring; it read like a textbook whenever Murugan was telling his stories.

a ray

I usually don’t review books I read for class but damn was this good

Anirudh r

Ivy Vatsala

Shape Mismatch

Martin Ackerfors

Lauren Bledsoe

Pratul

Kaela Childers

Michelle Li

Freeda Lobo

It begins in a near future New York City, when Antar, a low-level programmer and data analyst for a large bureaucratic concern, comes upon the lost and battered I.D. card of a man he once knew--a man who vanished without a trace some where in the teeming excess of Calcutta, India, several years before. Strangely compelled, Antar initiates a search into the facts behind the disappearance of the enigmatic L. Murugan, and is unwittingly drawn into a bizarre alternate history of medical science. Leaping backward in time, we join Murugan in Calcutta in 1995, as he follows the twisted threads of science, counter-science and ritual back a hundred years further to the laboratory of Ronald Ross, the British scientist who discovered how malaria is transmitted to humans. Obsessed with the weird, fortuitous coincidences that led to Ross' groundbreaking discovery, Murugan has stumbled upon evidence of an impossible ongoing experiment in controlled destiny, protected by a powerful unseen society that moves the world in secret and in silence. Suddenly, every fact hitherto known can no longer be trusted, for everything has been revealed to be other than it appears. In this steamy, overcrowded city of clashing cultures and hidden faces, L. Murugan has opened a Pandora's Box that carefully orchestrated death and misdirection have long kept shut. And the truth that is revealed will have momentous con sequences--for Murugan, for Antar, for a troubled female journalist and an exquisite Indian celebrity...for everyone and everything human.

The Calcutta Chromosome A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery

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