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Sea Of Poppies
by Amitav Ghosh
Description:
At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Her destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean shortly before the outbreak of the Opium Wars in China. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners on board, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a free-spirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of Canton.
About The Author
Amitav Ghosh (born 11 July 1956) is an Indian-American author best known for his work in English fiction.Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta on 11 July 1956 to a Bengali Hindu family, to Lieutenant Colonel Shailendra Chandra Ghosh, a retired officer of the pre-independence Indian Army. His first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi.
Ghosh lives in New York with his wife, Deborah Baker, author of the Laura Riding biography In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (1993) and a senior editor at Little, Brown and Company. They have two adult children, Lila and Nayan, who both work in the finance industry in New York. He has been a fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum. In 1999, Ghosh joined the faculty at Queens College, City University of New York, as Distinguished Professor in Comparative literature. He has also been a visiting professor at the English department of Harvard University since 2005. Ghosh subsequently returned to India began working on the Ibis trilogy which includes Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire (published May 2015).
He was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian government in 2007. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2015 Ghosh was named a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow.
Skryf Review
A beautifully written historical novel about 1830’s India in the grip of the opium trade. The characters are just as diverse as the British Empire itself, each with their own dialects and idiosyncrasies, all brought together by the opium trade’s many tentacle hands into the Ibis, on a voyage that will irrevocably changed them forever. The author has obviously done a massive amount of research into the period, and this novel is so rich with details that it could veritably serve as an encyclopedia of early 19th century Indian life, both at sea and on land. However, this was never allowed to stifle the narrative, which deftly moves between a half-dozen main characters and different settings with ease. The novel is as chock-full of exciting incidents as a door-stopper 19th century adventure yarn, without abandoning a realism which makes it a compelling page-turner. The humorous episodes, largely supplied by the Falstaff an figure of Baboo Nob Kissin, enlivens the story between accounts of opium addiction, imprisonment and various corporal punishments.