It is in his home town of Kolkata that Dr Anil Kumar Munshi meets, by chance, his distant relative Kanai Dutt, who upends his view of the world with a single word: bundook. Gun.

A writer and folklorist, Munshi has for years dedicated his research to the Halders of Raskhal, a once grand land-owning family, in whose downfall he sees the seed of his own misfortunes - his serial divorces and history of mental instability the legacy of his long-dead kinswoman, whose cruel impoverishment and suffering at the hands of that great family has been handed down from generation to generation. Now, at Kanai's briefest suggestion, he realizes that this family legacy may have deeper roots still, in the tale of a merchant that Munshi had always understood to be the stuff of Bengali legend.

As the ground beneath him shifts, Munshi sets out on an extraordinary journey that will take him from Kolkata to Venice and Sicily via a tangled route through the memories of those he meets along the way. What emerges is an extraordinary portrait of a man groping toward a sense of what is happening around him, struggling to grasp, from within his accepted understanding of the world, the reality with which he is presented.

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India before studying in Delhi and Oxford university. He is the author of several novels, including Sea of Poppies, the first in the Ibis trilogy, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and six works of non-fiction, including The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. In 2015, he was named as a finalist of the Man Booker International Prize.