Gun Island (2019) by Amitav Ghosh

 Audiobook Review

Gun Island (2019)

by Amitav Ghosh

  I saw this book in a Guardian article about "cli fi" fiction- which I interpret basically as "speculative fiction written by non-genre authors with weather themes."  In that sense, Gun Island isn't cli fi exactly, although it does fit a broader definition of the same term, i.e. any contemporary literary fiction with a climate derived theme.  After I read the article, I saw the Audiobook was readily available from the Libby library Audiobook app.

  Gun Island is told from the perspective of Deen Datta, a rare book dealer resident (citizen?) of New York, with deep ties to his Indian/Bangladeshi past.   Familiar ground for Ghosh, though he has abandoned the historical fiction milieu of the Ibis trilogy for something that seems close to Autofiction in terms of the similarity between Datta and the author. Autofictional similarities besides, Gun Island is a novel about the impact of climate change on the lives of those both most and least affected- from the village altering shifts in the Bengali delta to the wealth, fire-prone enclaves of Los Angeles.