Academics
THE LATEST WORK OF NON-FICTION BY AMITAV GHOSH, WINNER OF THE ERASMUS PRIZE At once a travelogue, a memoir and an excursion into history, both economic and cultural, Smoke and Ashes traces the transformative effect the opium trade has had on Britain, India and China, as well as on the world at large, over the centuries. Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world's biggest corporations, several of America's most powerful families and prestigious institutions -- and connected intrinsically to contemporary globalism, and even his own family history. Moving deftly between horticulture, the mythologies of capitalism and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, Smoke and Ashes reveals the pivotal role one small plant has played in the making of the world as we know it-one teetering on the edge of catastrophe.
September 1838. A storm blows up on the Indian Ocean and three ships--the Ibis, the Anahita and the Redruth--and those aboard are caught in the whirlwind. River of Smoke follows the fortunes of these men and women to the crowded harbours of China where they struggle to cope with their losses--and, for a few, unimaginable freedoms--in the alleys and teeming waterways of nineteenth-century Canton. Written on the grand scale of a historical epic, River of Smoke, book two in the Ibis trilogy, will be heralded as a masterpiece of twenty-first-century literature.
AMITAV GHOSHAdd a review
Login to write a review.
Customer questions & answers