The landscape, as well as the lives unfolding within it, is conjured magnificently: the marshy lowland in Calcutta is thick with water hyacinth, its periphery dotted with simple huts, the poor wading in to forage for food. This is a place where certain creatures "laid eggs that were able to endure the dry season. Others survived by burying themselves in mud, simulating death, waiting for the return of rain". Survival is fraught for the humans, too, in this engrossing novel.

Two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, often walk across the lowland on their way to play football. Though very different, one cautious and one of them reckless, the boys are very close: "Subhash was 13, older by 15 months. But he had no sense of himself without Udayan. From his earliest memories, at every point, his brother was there." Yet this is a novel in which the most tender of ties are torn asunder, and Lahiri traces these lives as they become haunted by the absence of loved ones.