Tbr: River of Smoke

 

    Here's a book I, like many others, have been looking forward to for two years. When I read Amitav Ghosh's remarkable Sea of Poppies in early 2009 (there's a post on it here), I knew it was the first part of a trilogy and I couldn't wait for the story to continue. Tomorrow sees the publication of the second volume, River of Smoke, and we re-join the crew of the Ibis and its consignment of convicts and indentured labourers on their journey from Calcutta to Mauritius in September 1838 as a storm blows up on the Indian Ocean, and the ship is caught in the whirlwind.

    Although the story leads on from that of Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke is a stand-alone novel, but still on the grand scale of an historical epic. We again meet Neel, the bankrupt Bengali zamindar, and the Calcutta-born Frenchwoman, Paulette. "Travelling with the horticulturalist and wildly eccentric Fitcher Penrose, Paulette has enlisted the help of the flâneur and painter Robin Chinnery in a search for the rare, legendary golden camellia." These characters and others end up in the crowded harbours of China "where, despite the efforts of the emperor to stop them, ships from Europe and India continue to exchange their cargoes of opium for boxes of tea, silk, porcelain and silver".

    His publishers say that in this second book in the series , Amitav Ghosh has not only sustained the brilliance of the first one but surpassed it - a true treat in store, then.