Amitav Ghosh

Two remarkable writers reach back through time, transporting readers to the 1800’s and offering us a glimpse of where we came from. Amitav Ghosh and Guy Vanderhaeghe offer us the remarkable opportunity to feel the past as a living present, to inhabit history and to experience it. In the Far East we ... (more)have the opium wars, and the collision of English, Chinese and Indian lives. Where Amitav Ghosh’s previous book, Sea of Poppies , brought us to India where opium was grown and prepared, his latest, River of Smoke , takes us into China, where that same opium is sold and consumed. In the West, we have the Medicine Line, where Chief Sitting Bull’s Sioux are trapped between America and the Grandmother’s Land. With A Good Man , Guy Vanderhaeghe, winner of two Governor General's Awards, completes the loose trilogy that began with The Englishman's Boy and Canada Reads winner The Last Crossing. Tickets: $15 ($10 reduced). Free for members.

At the heart of Amitav Ghosh's vibrant saga, Sea of Poppies, is a vast ship, the Ibis, whose destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, and whose purpose is to fight China's vicious 19th-century Opium Wars.

(NOTE: Tickets $5.00 EA / FREE for Educators & Students) (LOCATION: Fullerton Auditorium)

DESCRIPTION: The internationally acclaimed author of such prize-winning works of fiction and nonfiction as The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and Incendiary Circumstances will discuss his newest novel, ... (more)an epic, multigenerational account of the 19th-century opium trade and its many consequences set in a stunning array of locales—from the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, through the high seas of the Indian Ocean, to the exotic backstreets of China.

Chicago book critic Donna Seaman will join the discussion.

Generously sponsored by the Alsdorf Foundation

Moderation: Margarete von Schwarzkopf, Sprecherin: Julia Jäger. "Unterdrückung und Kolonialismus, das Aufeinanderprallen von Kulturen, Liebe und Hass sind die Themen des Autors des Weltbestsellers Der Glaspalast. Er liest aus seinem neuen Epos Das mohnrote Meer: 1838 – am Oberlauf des ... (more)Ganges schuften die Menschen für die englische Opiumindustrie. Verfolgung, Intrigen und Not vereinen eine Gruppe von Flüchtlingen als Schicksalsgemeinschaft auf der Ibis, einem ehemaligen Sklavenschiff."

Date & Time: Wednesday, 2nd July, 2008 at 6.30 pm

Venue: Crossword Bangalore, Residency Road

About the book:

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. ... (more)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.

About the author:

Amitav Ghosh is one of India's best-known writers. His books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, Incendiary Circumstances, The Hungry Tide. The Glass Palace won the Grand Prize for Fiction at the Frankfurt International e-Book Awards in 2001. The Hungry Tide won the Vodafone Crossword Book Award in 2004. In 2007 Amitav Ghosh was awarded the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Turin, Italy.