School of Distance Education

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and 
the Unthinkable
by Amitabh Ghosh 
Amitav Ghosh is a well-known name in the 
contemporary 
literature. 
The 
Indian-born 
writer 
produced a wide range of novels in the genre of 
historical fiction. His fictional work centers on the 
Southeast Asian population dealing with the identity 
crisis at different levels. A pioneer of Indian English 
Literature in India, Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956, 
and studied at Dehra Dun, New Delhi, Alexandria and 
Oxford and was awarded a doctorate from Oxford
University. His works include:
The Circle of Reason
, 
The Shadow Lines (1988)
,
The Calcutta Chromosome 
(1996), The Glass Palace 
(2000), and 
The Hungry Tide
(2004). His books of non-fiction include 3 collections of 
essays: 
Dancing in Cambodia and At Large in Burma
(1998); 
The Imam and the Indian
(2002), and 
Incendiary 
Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
40 
(2005). . He has also published 
The Great Derangement
(2016), a nonfiction book on climate change. 
By Reading climate change through the lens of 
fiction Mr. Ghosh provides a fresh perspective on the 
global calamity. Ghosh divides 
The Great Derangement 
into three parts: “Stories,” “History,” and “Politics.”. 
Stories” employs historical anecdotes and scenes from 
Ghosh’s own novels to situate us in the affective and 
geographical spaces of the “Anthropocene.” Through his 
work he argues that western fiction has been incapable 
voicing the concerns of climate change. The book 
explores the past present and the impending calamity of 
climate change. Ghosh denies the argument that climate 
change is a propaganda by environmental lobbies. While 
Asian countries and their booming industrial sector 
contributed to the acceleration of the climate change, its 
western counterparts had been reckless for a long period 
of time since industrial revolution.