Sea Of Poppies

The first in Amitav Ghosh’s new trilogy of novels, Sea of Poppies is a stunningly vibrant and intensely human work that confirms his reputation as a master storyteller. At the heart of this epic saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean to the Mauritius Islands. As to the people on board, they are a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval in the mid nineteenth century, fate has thrown together a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed village-woman, from a mulatto American freedman to a free-spirited European orphan. As they sail down the Hooghly and into the sea, their old family ties are washed away, and they view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers, who will build whole new lives for themselves in the remote islands where they are being taken. It is the beginning of an unlikely dynasty.

The sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields by the Ganga, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of China at the time of the Opium Wars. But it is the panorama of characters, whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, which makes Sea of Poppies so breathtakingly alive—a masterpiece from one of the world's finest novelists.

Advance praise for Sea of Poppies
Ghosh, as always, proposes a very particular, non-Western form of humanism, a belief in commonalities that exist across “race”, class and culture. Political imperatives determine many of the relationships in the novel, but for the most part fail to quench the force of individual human emotions—memories and desires, disappointment and aspirations… Ghosh’s success as a historical novelist owes much to the distinctiveness of each of his characters and his gift for contingent storytelling. These are underpinned by a mass of researched, specialist information, which brings a bygone era and vanished experiences to life through vividly realized detail. Along the way, and seemingly incidentally, we get a taxonomy of the various types of opium and their effects, a compellingly believable account of what life in both mid-nineteenth-century Calcutta and its rural hinterland might have been like, and a welter of maritime detail . . . The seaboard sections rival those in Melville and Conrad, but the scenes ashore are equally gripping, and one leaves this long page-turner wishing it would continue. Sea of Poppies is a tremendous novel . . . and [the] Ibis Trilogy will surely come to be regarded as one of the masterpieces of twenty-first-century fiction.’—Literary Review

‘At [the] centre is the Ibis, an old slaving ship whose ragtag crew is now made up of sailors, stowaways and convicts. As their voyage across the Indian Ocean gets under way, the social codes that would separate these very different individuals on dry land are gradually worn down and their stories begin to overlap . . . Together, their experiences form part of a vivid picture of the East’s troubled colonial past . . . Each scene is boldly drawn, but it is the sheer energy and verve of Amitav Ghosh’s storytelling that binds this ambitious medley.’—Daily Mail

‘Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies . . . revisits in new, breathtakingly detailed and compelling ways some of the concerns of his earlier novels. Among these are the incessant movements of the peoples, commerce, and empires that have traversed the Indian Ocean since antiquity; and the lives of men and women with little power, whose stories, framed against the grand narratives of history, invite other ways of thinking about the past, culture and identity . . . With the colourful characters, another bedazzling aspect of Sea of Poppies is the clash and mingling of languages. Bhojpuri, Bengali, Laskari, Hindustani, Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and a fantastic spectrum of English . . . create a vivid sense of living voices as well as the linguistic resourcefulness of people in diaspora.’—The Independent

Praise for Amitav Ghosh
'I cannot think of another contemporary writer with whom it would be so thrilling to go so far, so fast' -The Times
'If there is a distinctive genre known as Indian Writing in English, then Amitav Ghosh is perhaps its most scholarly practitioner. Ghosh is a traveler in the physical as well as the metaphysical, a writer of formidable learning and intelligence' -Indian Express
'Ghosh has established himself as one of the finest prose writers of his generation of Indian writing in English' -Financial Times