SOURCE: A review of The Shadow Lines, in World Literature Today, Vol. 65, No. 2, Spring, 1991, p. 365.

In the following review, Taneja offers a positive assessment of The Shadow Lines, complimenting Ghosh's ability to create a non-chronological yet cohesive story.

The new Indian English fiction of the eighties is free from the self-consciousness, shallow idealism, and sentimentalism that characterized the work of the older generation of novelists such as Raja Rao, R. K. Narayan, or Mulk Raj Anand, who started writing in the thirties. The fiction of the eighties takes a maturer view of Indian reality. There is freshness and vitality, and the writers betray remarkable confidence in tackling new themes and experiment with new techniques and approaches to handle those themes. Amitav Ghosh, whose first novel The Circle of Reason appeared in 1986, has strengthened the new English novel in more than one way.

The Shadow Lines takes us into...