Once upon a time an Indian writer named Amitav Ghosh set out to find an
Indian slave, name unknown, who some seven hundred years before had
traveled to the Middle East. The journey took him to a small village in
Egypt, where medieval customs coexist with twentieth-century desires and
discontents. But even as Ghosh sought to re-create the life of his
Indian predecessor, he found himself immersed in those of his modern
Egyptian neighbors. Combining shrewd observations with painstaking
historical research, Ghosh serves up skeptics and holy men, merchants
and sorcerers. Some of these figures are real, some only imagined, but
all emerge as vividly as the characters in a great novel. In an Antique
Land is an inspired work that transcends genres as deftly as it does
eras, weaving an entrancing and intoxicating spell.