SOURCE: “Threads and Shards,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4465, October 28, 1988, p. 1212.

In the following excerpt, Couto praises Ghosh's characterization and storytelling abilities in The Shadow Lines.

In his first novel, Circle of Reason, Amitav Ghosh wove a complex pattern of histories connecting lives in rural Bengal and remote Al Ghazira with a linguistic verve and technique clearly influenced by Midnight's Children yet without that book's power and impetus. In Shadow Lines, Ghosh has found his own distinctive voice—polished and profound. A narrative of three generations—the narrator's Bengali family in pre-Partition Dhaka and Calcutta, and their English friends, the Prices, whose histories encompass both world wars, the Left Book Club and shades of contemporary London—The Shadow Lines does not tell yet one more tale of the Raj but sets out to illuminate the absurdities of borders and frontiers, the lines of disillusion and tragedy that intersect...