Will I love The Great Derangement?

This is an important book of literary and cultural criticism. Traces why the overlooking of climate change in fiction is related to deeper cultural and colonial issues. This opened my eyes on several levels.

This is one of those books that is so dense with surprising and counterintuitive facts that I have found myself quoting it regularly for years. It upended my thinking about the way the world we live in is distributed and the manner in which we tell ourselves stories of change.

This book brings together fiction and a future that is being significantly formed by the impacts of climate change in a dialogue about freedom. I embraced this relation as an invitation to imagine. Ghosh makes a fundamental shift in contemporary life that starts to become evident.

As someone very interested in political thought (rather than party politics), it changed how I viewed freedom, a stated intent of the book. It moved my perceptions beyond familiar issues of emancipation from poverty and oppression across race, class, and gender to make clear a more basic dependence. There is no freedom without the… show more.

This is a tour de force exposing the vast history of the environment by European colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. It provides historical and contemporary insights into how European powers transformed and destroyed Indigenous nature and culture worldwide, whose aftermaths we are still discovering and facing every day. 

A series of lectures that shames the literary world for its lack of imagination in weaving the greatest threat humanity faces–climate change–into stories.

Ghosh is a first-rate novelist, but his greatest legacy will be his nonfiction work on climate, colonialism, and migration.

In this beautifully written book, Ghosh tackles a central question that really motivates me. How do we describe the world we are changing? In answering this question, Ghosh ponders why climate change is so hard to explain; why it is so hard to write about in novels and fiction. For me, this book is a thought-provoking quest into both the need for evocative literature on this topic and the hazards of drifting into science fiction or being dismissed as alarmist non-fiction. But in his explanation of the challenges of communicating climate change, Ghosh gave me a stronger vocabulary for doing… show more.

Tropical cyclones, floods, droughts, heatwaves, rising sea levels have become too frequent and intense in India. They all affect the poor the most. Changing weather patterns are impacting food production. Rising sea levels are altering coastlines, flooding fertile lands, gorging up villages, and making people refugees in their own lands. Yet the climate change debate is caught in scientific jargon, diplomatic talks, and arcane government plans. Through powerful prose and imagery, the book focuses on climate change as a phenomenon that is directly hitting the people and their livelihoods.