AMITAV GHOSH
Friday, November 14 at 7:30 p.m.

One of the finalists for this year's Man Booker Prize, and a longtime favorite of readers here and elsewhere, Amitav Ghosh makes this very welcome Elliott Bay return for his acclaimed new novel, Sea of Poppies (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). "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 dialectic 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 (London). Sea of Poppies is cast as the first book in an Ibis Trilogy. "[A] remarkably rich saga ... which has plenty of action and adventure à la Dumas, but moments also of Tolstoyan penetration—and a drop or two of Dickensian sentiment." - Adam Mars-Jones.

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