In this personal and wide-ranging exploration of how our collective imaginations fail to grasp the scale of environmental destruction, Amitav Ghosh summons writers and novelists to confront the most urgent story of our times. This is an extract from The Great Derangement, first published in 2016.
This book is part of Green Ideas, a series of twenty short books from Penguin Classics that brings you the ideas that have changed the way we think and talk about the living Earth.
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India. He studied at the universities of Delhi and Oxford, has taught at a number of institutions and written for many magazines. The first novel in the Ibis trilogy, Sea of Poppies, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008.