INTERSECTION OF PAST AND PRESENT

DEEN, a Brooklyn rare-book dealer from Calcutta, on a trip back home, becomes obsessed with the Bengali myth of the gun merchant who fled overseas to escape persecution from a snake goddess.

Visiting a shrine to the merchant, Deen is almost bitten by a snake, and so begins events in which the gun merchant’s story starts to become bound up in Deen’s.

The novel is stuffed with ideas about climate change, migration, the interconnectivity of past and present. It’s also a fussily written, hydra-headed mess of madly proliferating, credulity-stretching plot points. |