Gorgeously written, The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh was one of my top reads of 2024 and also my pick for non-choronlogical read for the 52Week Challenge. So much so that there were many moments when I couldn’t quite tell when things were happening. Its a novel without a central plot — told entirely through the fragmented nature of human memory . Evocative and layered, it’s a kind of memory-catcher, where our unreliable narrator pieces together stories from his childhood, spanning decades, cities, and continents.

Our unnamed narrator is a middle-class boy growing up in Calcutta, who looks up to his wayward cousin, Tridib. His childhood memories are full of Tridib’s philosophical ramblings, often interrupted by his grandmother’s stern warnings to stay away from the jobless dreamer. In this haze of memory, there is also Ila — his stylish cousin from London, on whom he clearly has a crush. Ila brings the Price family into their world, and the narrator eventually befriends Nick Price and his sister May. He later visits them in London, a time that feels worlds away from the playful afternoons in the ancestral home in Bengal.

Time becomes fluid, stories shift, and places blur as each character remembers the same events differently. One moment you’re in the crowded streets of Calcutta during Durga Puja; the next, you’re walking past the Price family’s home in London. One minute you’re hiding under a giant dining table in Bengal; the next, you’re listening to the narrator’s grandmother, tearfully reminiscing about her lost home in Dhaka.

“Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable.”
— Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines