Four New Books: Ghosh, Patchett, Mikhail, Wolfe

The New Yorker's Briefly Noted section reviews four new books. Amitav Ghosh's 'Ghost-Eye' (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) opens in 1960s Calcutta with a three-year-old Jain girl demanding fish, leading a psychologist to conclude she is a reincarnation from a Sundarban fishing village. Fifty years later, an energy corporation threatens the area, and the psychologist's nephew is recruited by an environmentalist to use old case files to save the forest. Ann Patchett's 'Whistler' (Harper) follows middle-aged narrator Daphne, who reconnects with her stepfather Eddie after a decades-long estrangement following a car accident and her mother's divorce. Alan Mikhail's 'Newcomers' (Liveright) is a biography of Anthony Jansen van Salee and Grietje Reyniers, who rose from obscure origins to become founding families of New Netherland, despite being banished to Long Island as 'sinful moral outsiders.' Matthew Wolfe's 'Fires in the Night' (Viking) chronicles the Earth Liberation Front's arsons in the 1990s-2000s and the FBI's pursuit, raising moral questions about activism.