The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - Amitav Ghosh

£11.50

UK delivery £5.50 - Free delivery on orders over £50!

Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.

The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements.

Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.

Delivery and Returns

Christmas deliveries: please order by 09:00 on Thursday 19 December so we can get it to the post office in time.

We decorate all our chinaware by hand and fire it here on site, so orders may take up to three weeks to arrive. If you're in a hurry please call us on 0117 944 4540 to check availability.

We offer FREE UK delivery on all orders over £50, or FREE Click & Collect from our Stokes Croft shop.
Standard UK delivery is £5.50. Click here for international delivery costs »

Our goal is to ensure complete customer satisfaction. We are happy to replace your item if faulty or damaged. For more information please see our returns page.