Ghosh's ambitious novels use complex narrative strategies to probe the nature of national and personal identity, particularly of the people of India and South Asia.

In 2010, he was a joint winner, along with Margaret Atwood, of a Dan David prize, and in 2011, he was awarded the Grand Prix of the Blue Metropolis festival in Montreal.

[9] His thesis, undertaken in the Faculty of Anthropology and Geography, was entitled, "Kinship in relation to economic and social organization in an Egyptian village community", and submitted in 1982.

[10] Ghosh returned to India to begin working on the Ibis trilogy, which includes Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011), and Flood of Fire (2015).

Though it was never part of a planned venture and did not begin as a conscious project, I realise in hindsight that this is really what always interested me most: the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the connections and the cross-connections between these regions.

[19]The Shadow Lines, according to one blogger, "throws light on the phenomenon of communal violence and the way its roots have spread deeply and widely in the collective psyche of the Indian subcontinent".

[21] According to a review in the Columbia Journal, This is Ghosh at his tenacious, exhausted best—marrying a mythical tale from his homeland with the plight of the human condition, all the while holding up a mirror to the country that he now calls home, as well as providing a perhaps too optimistic perspective on the future of our climate!

The use of religion, magical realism, coincidences, and climate change come together to create a wholesome story of strife, trauma, adventure, and mystery.

The reader takes on the journey to solve the story of "the Gun Merchant" and launches themselves into the destruction of nature and the effects of human actions.

The Guardian however, noted Ghosh's tendency to go on tangents, calling it "a shaggy dog story" that "can take a very roundabout path towards reality, but it will get there in the end".

[23] In 2021, Ghosh published his first book in verse, Jungle Nama, which explores the Sundarbans legend of Bon Bibi.

[24] Ghosh's notable non-fiction writings include In an Antique Land (1992), Dancing in Cambodia and at Large in Burma (1998), Countdown (1999), and The Imam and the Indian (2002), a collection of essays on themes such as fundamentalism, the history of the novel, Egyptian culture, and literature.

[39] Ghosh was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2024, specifically for his writing on climate change: "His work offers a remedy by making an uncertain future palpable through compelling stories about the past.