Volume 56, Number 1 · January 15, 2009
Adventures in the Opium Trade
By Cathleen Schine
Sea of Poppies
by Amitav Ghosh
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 515 pp., $26.00
Amitav Ghosh, an Indian anthropologist, historian, and novelist who lives and teaches in New York and India, is the author of ten books. His new novel, Sea of Poppies, which is the first in a projected trilogy and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is set in India in 1838, in the days leading up to the Opium Wars. Ghosh tracks the lives, and the language, of an unlikely collection of men and women—princes, sailors, merchants, pirates, peasants, and runaway girls—all of whom eventually converge on an American schooner called the Ibis.
Review, 4138 words
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