Sea of Poppies: A Novel by Amitav Ghosh
“India in the 1830s is wonderfully evoked—the smells, rituals and squalor . . . Coarseness and violence, cruelty and fatalism, are relieved with flashes of emotion and kindness. [Sea of Poppies] is no anti-colonial rant or didactic tableau but the story of men and women of all races and castes, cooped up on a voyage across the ‘Black Water’ that strips them of dignity and ends in storm . . . It is profoundly moving.” —Michael Binyon, The Times
“[A] terrific novel . . . In bringing his troupe of characters to Calcutta . . . Ghosh provides the reader with all manner of stories, and equips himself with the personnel to man and navigate an old-fashioned literary three-decker . . . Yet for all its research, Sea of Poppies is full of the open air. It never, as the eighteenth century used to say, ‘smells of the lamp.’ ” —James Buchan, The Guardian.
“Hugely entertaining . . . Glorious babel of a novel . . . Carried along by the sheer energy of the narrative, most readers will soon tune in to this marvelously inventive lingo . . . [Sea of Poppies] is utterly involving and piles on the tension until the very last page . . . The next volume cannot come too soon.” —Peter Parker, The Sunday Times (London).
“Bedazzling . . . Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, the first volume in his ‘Ibis trilogy,’ revisits in new, breathtakingly detailed and compelling ways some of the concerns of his earlier novels . . . We [await] with eagerness the second volume of the trilogy.” —Shirley Chew, The Independent.
$17.16 www.amazon.com Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 14, 2008)
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