The Great Derangement

A series of lectures that shames the literary world for its lack of imagination in weaving the greatest threat humanity faces–climate change–into stories.

Ghosh is a first-rate novelist, but his greatest legacy will be his nonfiction work on climate, colonialism, and migration.

In this beautifully written book, Ghosh tackles a central question that really motivates me. How do we describe the world we are changing? In answering this question, Ghosh ponders why climate change is so hard to explain; why it is so hard to write about in novels and fiction. For me, this book is a thought-provoking quest into both the need for evocative literature on this topic and the hazards of drifting into science fiction or being dismissed as alarmist non-fiction. But in his explanation of the challenges of communicating climate change, Ghosh gave me a stronger vocabulary for doing… show more.

Tropical cyclones, floods, droughts, heatwaves, rising sea levels have become too frequent and intense in India. They all affect the poor the most. Changing weather patterns are impacting food production. Rising sea levels are altering coastlines, flooding fertile lands, gorging up villages, and making people refugees in their own lands. Yet the climate change debate is caught in scientific jargon, diplomatic talks, and arcane government plans. Through powerful prose and imagery, the book focuses on climate change as a phenomenon that is directly hitting the people and their livelihoods.