Full name: In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale

Author: Amitav Ghosh Year: 1993 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: History, Travel Cultures: Egypt, India, Africa Purchase/reserch links: Amazon Goodreads Barns&Noble Google Books eBooks.com LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780679727835 0679727833

Once upon a time an Indian writer named Amitav Ghosh set out 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. Similar books: A Thousand Miles up the Nile by Amelia B. Edwards The Blue Nile by Alan Moorehead Spice by Jack Turner Cairo by Max Rodenbeck Letters from Egypt by Florence Nightingale Empires of the Indus by Alice Albinia Down the Nile by Rosemary Mahoney Holy Cow by Sarah Macdonald The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto Tocqueville's Discovery of America by Leo Damrosch Travels into Bokhara by Alexander Burnes The Devil's Cup by Stewart Lee Allen How Paris Became Paris by Joan Dejean Secret Tibet by Fosco Maraini Calcutta by Geoffrey Moorhouse The City of Florence by R. W. B. Lewis Surrender or Starve by Robert D. Kaplan In Europe by Geert Mak A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Tony Horwitz