Sea of Poppies: 1 (Ibis Trilogy) - Softcover

"A wonderful book, a large ambitious novel in which extraordinary people come to life and vibrant, exotic places are memorably depicted." --The Rocky Mountain News

"A delight . . . [Ghosh's] descriptions bring a lost world to life." --The Washington Post

"Brilliant...By the book's stormy and precarious ending, most readers will clutch it like the ship's rail awaiting, just like Ghosh's characters, the rest of the voyage to a destination unknown." --USA Today

"Ghosh's best and most ambitious work yet. . . . Ghosh writes with impeccable control, and with a vivid and sometimes surprising imagination." --The New Yorker

"Ghosh, on behalf of history, is unforgiving, but his novel is also a delight." --Miami Herald

"A storm tossed adventure worthy of Sir Walter Scott." --Vogue

"Amitav Ghosh's new novel speaks in tongues, marvelously capturing the polyglot nature of its characters. . . . Sea of Poppies is marvelous, its range and authority astonishing." --The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

"Sea of Poppies is a veritable cauldron of energy intermingling with craft." --Chicago Sun-Times

The first in an epic trilogy, Sea of Poppies is "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" (The Observer [London]).

At the heart of this vibrant saga is a vast ship, the Ibis. Her destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean shortly before the outbreak of the Opium Wars in China. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners on board, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a free-spirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of Canton. With a panorama of characters whose diaspora encapsulates the vexed colonial history of the East itself, Sea of Poppies is "a storm-tossed adventure worthy of Sir Walter Scott" (Vogue).